Well-Schooled in Murder (44 page)

Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed
appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness
.

The pupils began to file out of the chapel—row after row of them, standing tall, their eyes straight ahead, their uniforms pressed, their hair neatly combed, their faces fresh.
They must know
, he thought.
All of them. They’ve known all along
.

Now he leaned forward and pressed the button on the tape recorder as the torment of the boy ended yet another time with guttural laughter and the sound of weeping. He waited for the Headmaster to speak.

Lockwood pushed away from the chair and went to the window. He had opened it upon their entrance into the room a quarter-hour previously, and now he pushed on it further and let the cold morning air hit his face. He pursed his lips and inhaled like whistling in reverse. He remained in that posture for nearly a minute. Near him, Sergeant Havers looked towards Lynley. He directed his head at the chair next to him. She took it.

“A pupil,” Lockwood murmured at last. “A
pupil
.”

An inadvertent underlying note of relief rang past the Headmaster’s statement. Lynley understood. Lockwood had made his own quick assumptions about how the tape could complete another part of the puzzle of murder. If a pupil were responsible for Matthew Whateley’s death, the onus of blame did not fall so heavily upon the school. A pupil’s culpability meant that no paedophile had been lurking unidentified among the staff members. No monster dwelt behind a facade of pedagogical purity. Bredgar Chambers’ reputation—and hence the Headmaster’s—was safeguarded as long as that was the case.

“What penalty does a boy face for bullying?”

Lockwood turned from the window to answer. “He gets warned off twice. If it happens a third time, he’s expelled. But in this case…” Lockwood’s voice drifted off as he joined them at the table, choosing the chair at its head rather than the more logical one next to Sergeant Havers.

“In this case?” Lynley prompted.

“This isn’t an ordinary sort of bullying. You can hear that for yourself. It sounded like an ongoing sort of thing, perhaps a nightly visitation. For that, the boy would be out at once. Absolutely. No doubt about it.”

“Expelled.”

“Yes.”

“What would be the chances of that boy getting into another independent school?”

“No chance at all, if I had anything to do with it.” Lockwood seemed to like the sound of finality behind his declaration, for he repeated, “No chance at all,” giving separate emphasis to each word.

“Matthew sent this tape to a friend of his in Hammersmith,” Lynley informed the Headmaster. “It’s a copy. He told her he’d keep the original recording here at the school. So he must have hidden it or given it to someone he thought he could trust, in the hope that doing so would stop the bullying. We think it’s Harry Morant who’s being bullied, by the way.”

“Morant? The lad Matthew Whateley was to visit last weekend?”

“Yes.”

Lockwood frowned. “If Matthew had given the tape to a staff member, it would have been turned over to me at once. So I can only assume that if he gave it to anyone—rather than hiding it—it would have to be a pupil. As you said, someone he could trust.”

“Someone, at least, he thought he could trust. Someone whose position indicated he
could
be trusted.”

“You’re thinking of Chas Quilter.”

“Senior prefect,” Lynley noted. “There doesn’t seem to be another pupil more trustworthy, does there? Where is he?”

“This is my usual weekly meeting time with him. I asked him to wait in the library.”

“Sergeant?” Lynley directed Havers to fetch the boy. She left the Headmaster’s study to do so.

The library comprised one-quarter of the south quadrangle, abutting the Headmaster’s study. Within moments, Havers had returned from it with Chas Quilter behind her. Lynley rose to greet the boy and noticed his eyes move questioningly from the tape recorder on the table to the Headmaster, who remained seated at its head. When asked to do so, Chas took a seat at the table himself, a chair next to Lockwood. It was as if by choice of seating, battle lines had been drawn, with the Headmaster and his senior prefect on one side of the conflict, and Lynley and Havers on the other. Loyalty to school, Lynley thought and readied himself to see whether Chas would also show loyalty to the school’s motto.
Honor sit et baculum et ferula
. The next few minutes would tell the tale. Lynley played the tape.

Hot blood surged up Chas’ neck as he listened. His Adam’s apple suddenly became prominent, bobbling ostensibly of its own volition. One hand reached for his ankle, which rested across his knee. His spectacles reflected the morning light from the windows, disks of gold behind which his eyes were hidden.

“Matthew Whateley recorded it,” Lynley said at the conclusion of the tape. “He wired a room for sound here at the school. This is a duplicate of the original tape. We’re looking for that original.”

“Do you know anything about this, Quilter?” the Headmaster asked. “The police believe that the boy either hid the original or gave it to someone for safekeeping.”

Chas addressed his answer to Lockwood. “Why would he do either of those things?”

Lynley replied. “Because he believed he had to follow the school’s unwritten rules.”

“Rules, sir?”

Lynley found the question disingenuous and irritating. “The same unwritten rules that made Brian Byrne reluctant to tell us how many times you left the upper sixth social club on the night Matthew disappeared. Just as you’re reluctant now to tell us about the tape.”

A minor movement betrayed the boy, his right shoulder pulling back as if by the force of an invisible hand. “D’you think
I—
”

Lockwood interposed with a baleful glare in Lynley’s direction. His conciliatory words indicated that the behaviour of the sons of knighted physicians was above reproach, no matter their elder brothers’ failures. “No one thinks anything, Quilter. The police aren’t here to accuse you.”

Next to him, Lynley heard Havers mutter a nearly inaudible oath. He waited for Chas to respond.

“I’ve not heard the tape before now,” the boy said. “I didn’t know Matthew Whateley. I couldn’t say where he put the tape, or even if he gave it to someone else.”

“Do you recognise the voices?” Lynley asked.

“No, I can’t say—”

“But it sounds like an upper sixth boy, doesn’t it?”

“Possibly. I suppose. But it could be anyone, sir. I wish I could help. I
ought
to be able to help. I know that. I’m sorry.”

There was a quick knocking at the door, three light taps. It opened. Elaine Roly stood framed in the doorway. Lockwood’s secretary lurked behind her, attempting to prevent the intrusion. But the matron of Erebus House was not to be thwarted. She threw a withering look upon the secretary and marched across the fine Wilton carpet.

“
She
tried to stop me,” the matron said. “But I knew you’d want this straightaway.” She pulled something from the sleeve of her blouse, saying, “Little Harry Morant gave that to me this morning, Inspector. He won’t say where he found it. Nor what he was doing with it. But you can see clear as clear that it belonged to Matthew Whateley.”

She dropped a sock on the table. Chas Quilter jerked spasmodically in his chair.

The library smelled largely of pencil shavings and books. The former odour emanated from the electric pencil sharpener that was used by students with more delight and enthusiasm than actual need. The latter drifted from the tall serried shelves of volumes that jutted out from the walls, their ranks broken intermittently by broad study tables. Chas Quilter sat at one of these, finding it inexplicable that he should feel so numb as his world continued to crumble round him, like a building caught in a conflagration that gives itself up, piece by piece, to the flames. He remembered a Latin phrase that had been one of many he had been forced to memorise as a fourth form student.
Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet
.

Alone, he whispered the translation into the listening room. “‘For it is your business, when the wall next door catches fire.’”

How true the aphorism was proving. How assiduously he had avoided facing it. It was as if, without knowing, he had been running from that fire for the last sixteen months, yet every path he had chosen only brought him face to face with another wall of flame.

His flight had begun the previous year with his brother’s expulsion from the school. How well he remembered the course of those events: his parents’ outrage at the initial accusation made against an older son who wanted for nothing; Preston’s hot denials and insistence upon proof; his own impassioned defence of his brother at gatherings of supportive but sceptical friends; and then the humiliation attendant to the knowledge that the accusations were true. Money, clothing, pens and pencils, special food brought in tuck boxes from home. It hadn’t mattered to Preston. He had stolen without thinking, whether he wanted the item or not.

In reaction to the revelation of his brother’s sickness—for it
was
a sickness and Chas knew that—he had run from Preston. He had run from his brother’s need, from his shame, from his weakness. All that had seemed important at the time was to disassociate himself from disgrace. He had done so, throwing himself into his studies and avoiding any circumstance during which his brother’s name or his folly might arise. Thus, he left Preston alone in the flames. Yet even as he did so, he faced the fire himself, where he least expected to find it.

Sissy, he believed, would be his salvation, the one person in his life with whom he could be perfectly honest, entirely himself. In the months that followed Preston’s expulsion from the school, Sissy had learned all of Chas’ weaknesses and his strengths. She had learned of his pain and his confusion, of his hard-edged resolve to make up for Preston’s mistakes. Through it all she had been there for him during his lower sixth year, calm and serene. Yet as Chas allowed himself to grow closer to her, he failed to see that she was just another wall, that she too would give over to fire and destruction.

So the wall next door had indeed caught fire. The fire had spread. It was time to put an end to the burning. But to do so would put an end to himself as well. If only his own life hung in the balance, Chas knew it wouldn’t matter what he did at this point. He would speak without caring what consequences might follow. But his life touched upon other lives. His responsibilities did not end at the boundaries of Bredgar Chambers.

He thought about his father and his generous expenditure of time in Barcelona where each year during his own holidays he offered his services as a plastic surgeon to those who could not otherwise afford to see one, repairing cleft palates, rebuilding the faces of accident victims, grafting skin over burns, reshaping deformities. He thought about his mother and her lifetime of selfless devotion to both husband and sons. He thought about their faces on that final morning last year when they packed Preston’s belongings into their Rover and tried not to let the depth of their confusion and humiliation show. They had not deserved such a blow as Preston’s fall from grace had dealt them. So Chas had thought. And so he had determined to alleviate their suffering, to replace it with pride. He could do that, he thought, for he was not Preston. He was
not
Preston. He was not.

Yet even as he swore this to himself, words came swimming into his mind without provocation, like incantations in a nightmare. He had read them this morning while waiting for his meeting with the Headmaster, and now he saw and heard them all again.
Acrobrachycephaly. Syndactyly. Coronal suture
. Without wanting to, he heard Sissy weeping. Without wanting to, he felt guilt and grief. Again he faced that burning wall and tried futilely to tell himself it was not his business.

But he failed to convince himself of anything at all save the extent of his personal culpability in the damage he had inflicted upon the people in his life.

Harry knew what was expected of him the moment he walked into the Headmaster’s study. Only Mr. Lockwood and the two detectives from New Scotland Yard were there. On the table in the bay window, Matthew Whateley’s sock curled like an incomplete question mark. Someone had turned it inside out, and even from where he stood by the door, Harry could see the small white tag and the black number
4
printed upon it.

He had wanted Miss Roly to give it to the police. He had even expected her to do so. But he hadn’t thought that Mr. Lockwood would be told, nor had he imagined that his own part in the drama would not end with his handing over Matthew Whateley’s sock. Naturally, he’d seen enough detective shows on television that he
should
have realised the police would want to speak with him. But now that he was here, with the tall blond detective leading him to a chair, his hand warm and firm on Harry’s shoulder, he wished he had kept the sock to himself or thrown it away or left it where it was for someone else to discover.

All those wishes were in vain and too late. Harry felt waves of hot and cold wash over him as the detective pulled out a chair for him at the table.