Well-Schooled in Murder (45 page)

He kept his eyes on his hands that were balled into fists in his lap. His right thumb, he saw, had an ink mark on it that was shaped like lightning. It looked like a tattoo.

“I’m Inspector Lynley. This is Sergeant Havers,” the blond man was saying.

Harry heard a rustle of paper. The sergeant was getting ready to take notes.

He felt so cold. His legs began to shake. His arms quivered. If he spoke, he knew that his teeth would chatter and that the words themselves would come out distorted by tremors that fast gave way to sobs.

“Matron Roly tells us that you gave her this sock,” Inspector Lynley was saying. “Where did it come from, Harry?”

A clock was ticking somewhere in the room. Funny, Harry thought, he’d not noticed it last time he’d been in Mr. Lockwood’s study.

“Did you find it in one of the buildings? Or on the grounds somewhere?”

He could smell the flowers in the centre of the table. Mrs. Lockwood grew them. He’d seen her shadowy movements inside the greenhouse that she called her conservatory. He’d even sneaked a look inside once at the long brick paths between rows of plants. She kept a section for flowers, another for vegetables. Pots hung from poles. Water dripped rhythmically. The soil smelled rich.

“Did you have it all along, Harry? It’s Matthew’s, you know. You
do
know that, don’t you?”

His mouth tasted sour. All along his tongue, back into his throat, was a ridge of flavour like rotten lemons. He swallowed against it. His throat was sore.

“Are you listening to Inspector Lynley?” Mr. Lockwood demanded. “Morant, are you listening? Answer him, boy. At once.”

He could feel the wood on the back of the chair. It pressed into his shoulder blades. One part of the carving was like a little bulb of pain.

Mr. Lockwood continued. Harry heard his anger. “Morant, I’ve absolutely no intention—”

The detective made a movement. A sharp, mechanical
click
followed. Then the room was filled with the sound of the voice.

Want a grind, nancy boy, want a grind, want a grind?

Harry’s eyes flew up and he saw a tape recorder in front of the detective. He cried out once, tried to cover his ears to block out the sound. But it was no good. The voice continued. The nightmare was real. He stuffed his fingers into his ears. Still, snatches came to him, filled with derision, contempt, and loathing.

Little thing in our panties…oooh…have a look…little cobblers…squeeze…

The horror crashed upon him, as if fresh and new, and he began to cry. The tape switched off. He felt strong but gentle hands remove his fingers from his ears.

“Who did this to you, Harry?” Inspector Lynley asked.

Weeping, Harry looked up. The detective’s face was implacable, but his eyes were dark, they were kind and compelling. They invited confidence. They demanded truth. But to tell…He couldn’t. Not that. Not ever. Still, he had to say something. He had to speak. Everyone was waiting.

“I’ll take you,” he said.

Lynley and Havers followed Harry Morant out the front doors of the school. They crossed the car park in front of the east wing of the quadrangle and set off on the path that led to Calchus House. Since pupils were in their lessons, the grounds were deserted.

Harry trotted ahead of them without saying a word, rubbing his arm back and forth across his flushed face as if to obliterate the signs of his weeping. In the hope that the boy might be encouraged to say more than he had said in the presence of the Headmaster, Lynley had managed to convince Lockwood to remain in his study. But aside from that single sentence spoken on a torn cry, Harry had offered nothing else.

He appeared determined to remain mute as long as possible, putting space between himself and the police as he scurried down the path. His shoulders were hunched. He looked furtively from side to side. By the time they were twenty yards from Calchus House, he was nearly running, and he vanished inside before Lynley and Havers reached the door.

They found him waiting in the building’s entry hall, a small shadow in the darkest corner by the telephone. Lynley noted that Calchus House had the same floor plan as Erebus House where Matthew Whateley had lived, and like Erebus, it was in need of repair.

Harry waited until they had closed the door before he slipped past them and made for the stairs. He ran up two flights with Lynley and Havers on his heels. At no point did he look back to see if they were following him. Indeed, it appeared that he hoped he might lose them, and he almost did in the upstairs corridor when he made a quick turn into the southwest corner of the building.

They found him standing by a door. He looked shrunken in size, and he kept his back against the wall as if in the fear of being taken unaware.

“In here,” was all he said.

“This is where you found Matthew’s sock?” Lynley clarified.

“On the floor.” He hugged his arms across his stomach.

Lynley eyed the boy, concerned that he might attempt flight. He pushed open the door and looked into the hot, malodorous little room.

“Drying room,” Sergeant Havers said. “There’s one in every building. God, what a smell!”

“You checked it, Sergeant?”

“I checked them all. They’re exactly like this one. And as foul-smelling.”

Lynley looked at Harry, who was staring straight ahead. His dark hair had fallen across his brow, and his face looked feverish. “Stay with him,” he told Havers and went into the room. He propped the door open behind him.

There was little enough to see, just water pipes hung with clothes on the walls, a linoleum floor, a single light bulb, a padlocked trap door in the ceiling. Lynley climbed the metal ladder built into the wall to check the trap door, his head brushing against the wads of chewing gum that had been used to decorate it. He reached out, grasped the padlock, and jerked down upon it. It pulled easily away from the hasp that served to keep the door closed, and holding it in his hand, Lynley saw what his sergeant had evidently overlooked in her perusal of the room from the floor below. Someone had used a hacksaw on the padlock. Someone had managed to gain easy access to whatever existed above the trap door. Lynley shoved it open.

Above him was revealed a narrow, dark passageway, its walls covered with paint-chipped plaster. At the end of the passage, a warped door was cracked open and a weak beam of light shot out from it, like daylight diffused through a dirty window. Ascending the final steps of the ladder, Lynley lifted himself into the passageway, coughing against the dust which rose like a miasma with his movements.

He had no torch with him, but the light from the drying room below, in addition to that which came from the doorway at the end of the passage, served to show him the footprints that padded back and forth across the floor. He examined them but saw nothing to distinguish them beyond the fact that they were made by athletic shoes, probably male. He sidestepped several fairly decent prints and went to the door at the passage’s end.

It was well-oiled and free of dust. The slightest pressure of his knuckles upon it was sufficient to glide it soundlessly open, revealing a small chamber of the sort peculiar to fifteenth-century buildings, a useless space tucked beneath the gabled roof and no doubt long forgotten by those in authority. It had, however, been neither forgotten nor useless to someone.

Three perpendicular windows along the west wall admitted weak light through windowpanes that were filthy from years of neglect. The consequences of this same neglect extended outward from the windows like an insidious web. Stains covered the walls, some from the damp, others looking like the result of liquor hurled in drunkenness or anger, still others in splatters of rusty brown bearing the appearance of blood. Where there were no stains, lewd drawings had been scrawled onto the plaster, male and female figures engaged in a variety of sexual postures. Rubbish lay in piles on the dusty floor—cigarette butts, candy and crisp wrappers, empty beer bottles, a plastic glass, an institutional mug, an ancient orange blanket left in a heap before the fireplace. This contained its own complement of debris as well as a foul mass of ashes that contributed to air that was already foetid with the odours of urine and excrement. On the plain stone mantelpiece, hardened globules of wax fixed four white candles into position. They were stubs only, and the amount of wax that surrounded their bases gave testimony to the frequency with which the room had been used surreptitiously at night.

Lynley let his eyes take in all of this, realising that it represented a preponderance of evidence that would take a forensic team weeks to sort through in an attempt to place Matthew Whateley in the room prior to his death. That the evidence was here somewhere—represented by a hair from the boy’s head or a spot of his blood or a scraping of his skin or a fibre that matched one found on his body—was a fact that Lynley did not question for an instant. But the thought of Patsy Whateley’s disintegrating condition was building a pressure within him to bring the case to a quick conclusion. It was inconceivable that he might have to wait an arrest upon the slow and meticulous work of a forensic team. For that reason, he returned to the trap door and called down to the drying room, seeking a way to end Harry Morant’s persistent refusal to speak. Sergeant Havers came to the door in answer.

“I’d like Harry to see this, Sergeant,” he told her. “Give him some help up the ladder, will you?”

She nodded, fetched the boy, and he joined Lynley in the passageway. Hand on his shoulder, Lynley took him to the room and stood him just inside the door, holding him back against his own body. The boy felt as frail as a reed beneath his grasp.

“This is where Matthew was taken,” Lynley said. “Someone brought him here, Harry, perhaps having told him that they needed to have a little talk, perhaps having indicated to him that it was time to put an end to grievances, or perhaps having even rendered him unconscious so that it didn’t matter what sort of excuse was cooked up. But this is where he was brought.”

Lynley turned the boy’s head towards a corner of the room where the dust on the floor was most agitated. “I imagine he was tied up in that corner. See how the cigarette butts litter the floor there? He was burnt with cigarette butts, all over his body. Inside his nose and on his testicles as well. I suppose you’ve heard that. You can imagine what it must have been like for him, smelling his skin burning and feeling the pain.”

Harry’s trembling was making his body rigid. He gulped for air.

“You can smell the urine, can’t you?” Lynley went on. “And the faeces. Matthew wouldn’t have been allowed to go to a lavatory, so he would just have had to dirty himself. It wouldn’t have mattered much, as he didn’t have his clothes on. But that’s why the room smells.”

Harry’s head was flung back against Lynley’s chest. He whimpered.

Lynley touched the boy’s forehead. It was searingly hot. “It’s guesswork on my part, but I dare say most of it’s the truth, Harry. That’s what happened to Matthew before he died. But only you can tell us who did it to him.”

Harry shook his head frantically.

“He knew that you were being bullied. But he wasn’t like the other boys, was he? He wasn’t an ordinary sort who would look the other way, relieved that he wasn’t the one being harassed. He was the sort of boy who couldn’t abide cruelty. Besides, you were his mate. He wasn’t about to stand aside and let someone continue to assault his mate. So he engineered a method to stop it all. He wired your room. He made a tape. I imagine he did it three weeks ago during Friday afternoon games when he got that off-games chit from the Sanatorium, pretending he was ill. That would have given him time to set up his sound system and to try it out with no one—save you, of course—being the wiser. Once the room was ready, all you had to do was wait for the next visitation at night. And it
was
at night, wasn’t it? That’s when these things generally happen.”

A heaving of the boy’s shoulders told Lynley that he had begun to cry.

“After the tape was made, the bullying stopped, didn’t it? It couldn’t go on. So everyone was safe. If the bully so much as stepped out of line again, the tape would be produced, and he would be finished here at the school. Except that I don’t imagine Matthew ever really intended the bully to be expelled. He wouldn’t have wanted to do that, no matter how much the bully deserved it. He probably wanted to give the bloke a fair chance to straighten up. So he didn’t give the tape to the Headmaster, did he? He gave it to someone else. The only thing he didn’t understand was that to a bully the act of aggression is everything. It’s an obsession. It’s a real need. In order to go back to his harassment, our bully needed that tape. He needed the copy that had been made of it. He brought Matthew here to get them.”

A cry escaped Harry’s throat. His feet marched in place against the floor.

“Someone’s got to break the silence,” Lynley said. “Matthew Whateley tried, but his way didn’t work. One can’t use half-measures when it comes to the truth, Harry. If nothing else, I hope you see that. Matthew’s dead now because he tried a half-measure. I want the name of his killer.”

“Can’t. No.
Can’t!
” Harry gasped.

“You can. You must. Give me the name.”

Harry writhed in Lynley’s grasp. His head fell forward against his chest. His arms came up. He tried to prise Lynley’s hands from his shoulders.