Well-Schooled in Murder (47 page)

“You told him it was Matthew who had done the taping?”

Chas shook his head. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were bleak. A thin line of sweat beaded his upper lip. “I didn’t tell him that. But it didn’t take Clive long to figure it out for himself. Matt was Harry’s closest mate here at school. They did model railways together. They were always hanging about together. They were both…a bit young for their age.”

“I can try to understand keeping the tape to yourself once Matthew Whateley gave it to you,” Lynley said. “Especially if it put the bullying to an end. I may not agree with your having done that, but at least I can understand. What I can’t understand is the past three days. You must have known—”

“I didn’t know anything for sure!” Chas protested. “I still don’t. I knew Clive had bullied Harry Morant. I knew Matthew made the tape. I knew there was a duplicate. I knew Clive wanted it. But that’s
all
I knew.”

“When Matthew went missing, exactly what did you think?”

“What everyone else thought. That he’d run off. He wasn’t very happy here. He didn’t have many friends.”

“And when his body was found? What did you think?”

“I didn’t know. I
don’t
know. I still don’t…” The boy broke off wretchedly. He slumped in the chair.

“You chose not to know,” Lynley said. “You chose not to ask questions. You chose to turn a blind eye to the obvious, didn’t you?” He shoved the cassette into his pocket and looked at the display of quotations on the wall. The room seemed stifling. The smell of sweat and nerves burned into the air. “You forgot Marlowe,” he told the boy. “‘There is no sin but ignorance.’ Perhaps you’d like to add that to your collection.”

When the detectives were gone, Chas put his head down upon his arms and finally allowed himself to weep, giving way to an anguish that had taken root from the seeds of his betrayal of his brother, that had blossomed with his loss of Sissy, that had borne fruit—bitter and malformed—in the last eight days of his life.

He had been trying to write about it, instinctively seeking a purgation of the spirit through the means of verse. He had excelled at that once, had littered the surface of his desk with countless poetic panegyrics to and for and about Sissy. But the agonies of the last few days—in conjunction with the torments that had howled in single-minded pursuit of him for more than a year—had silenced that interior voice which had soared within him, which had once so fired his soul and fueled his passion to write. There were no more words that could diminish a suffering which had become such an all-consuming presence in his life that it appeared to have neither alpha nor omega. It was a wretchedness that was monstrous in form, reaching out to attach itself to everything that brushed near the periphery of his life.

How convenient it had been to turn away from Preston, to excuse his abandonment of his brother by declaring it necessary to the salvation of his family’s name. But the reality was that in proving himself not only fallible but also deeply troubled, Preston had fallen from the older-brother pedestal upon which Chas had placed him, and his
own
pride was wounded at having been duped by the guise of guilelessness that his brother had worn. So he had refused to speak to him once the charges were verified. He had refused to see him on his last morning at the school. He had refused to answer the single letter Preston wrote him. He had refused most of all to see a connection between this rejection of his brother and the fact that Preston had gone to Scotland and not returned.

In losing his brother, he had turned to Sissy, making her the vital force through which his blood flowed. In seven months she had grown from his schoolgirl friend, to the single safest harbour for his thoughts, to the inspiration of his writing, to the burning obsession that dominated every moment he did not spend in her company. But like his brother, Sissy was gone, destroyed by his selfishness and need, crushed by the force of an impetuosity that he had neither the sense nor the desire to control.

And hadn’t that same impetuosity driven the machinery of Matthew Whateley’s death? For without a second thought, he had played the tape for Clive Pritchard—he had even taken a secret satisfaction at the expression of astonishment on Clive’s face when he realised he had actually been bettered by a little third former who should have been nothing more than an inconsequential ant beneath his feet. He had so enjoyed Clive’s reaction that his own face had been momentarily—and fatally—unguarded when the other boy demanded the name of the tape’s creator, guessing Matthew Whateley within the first four boys mentioned. So he himself had inadvertently given Matthew over to Clive. He himself had set the deadly wheels in motion.

Ultimately, they were all connected: his brother, Sissy, Matthew, Clive. He was the sickness that had infected them all. There was only one cure. He feared it. He lacked the will, the courage, and the backbone to do it. He despised himself for his days of indecision, for his lack of resolve in carrying it out. But beyond a doubt he knew what it was.

Clive Pritchard had turned his bed-sitting room in Calchus House into a shrine to James Dean. The actor’s likeness was everywhere: striding down a street in New York, hands shoved into his pockets, the collar of his jacket turned up against the cold; climbing an oil derrick in the motion picture
Giant
; cradling a dying Sal Mineo in
Rebel Without a Cause
; posing beside the Porsche that killed him; staring moodily at the camera in a dozen different close-ups that had been cut from a calendar; smoking on the set of
East of Eden
. It was like being thrust suddenly into another country, into a time warp. Thirty years disappeared in an instant.

The room’s other decoration underlined this feeling. Old Coca-Cola bottles lined the windowsill beneath which stood a tattered vinyl stool that looked as if it had come from an old American diner. A chrome tabletop music selector perched on the desk along with three menus largely featuring hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, and milk shakes. On the bookshelves a pair of high-top black tennis shoes sat next to a small neon sign reading
Coke
.

The only anachronism—aside from a photograph of the rugby first fifteen and another of Clive in fencing regalia which were posted on the clothes cupboard—was a third photograph on the desk. In it, Clive posed with a terrified-looking elderly woman, his arm round her shoulders, his fingernails biting into her upper arm. He had shaved both sides of his head, leaving only a patch of hair down the middle. This was dyed blue and it stood up straight from his scalp in spikes. He was dressed in black, in an ensemble that comprised mostly leather and chains.

The contrast between that pictorial Clive Pritchard and the boy who came into the room in the company of the Headmaster was remarkable. Seeing him in his school clothes—his hair grown out and neatly combed, his shoes buffed, his pullover and trousers and shirt spotless—it was difficult for Lynley to believe that he was the same boy in the photograph.

Having the identity of the bully on Matthew Whateley’s tape established conclusively through the words of Chas Quilter, having been given the additional information regarding the chamber above the drying room in Calchus House, Alan Lockwood had not hesitated to act. With Lynley and Havers in his office, he had placed a call to Northern Ireland, where Clive Pritchard’s father—a career army colonel—had been stationed for the past eighteen months. His message to Colonel Pritchard was brief enough. Clive had been expelled from Bredgar Chambers. It was the Headmaster’s decision. The Board of Governors would be informed. Because of the circumstances, there would be no court of appeal. If the colonel would be so good as to send a family member…

There was a lengthy pause in which both Lynley and Havers could hear a sharp voice raised on the other end of the line. Lockwood quelled it with a sharpness of his own when he broke into Colonel Pritchard’s protest with, “A boy’s been murdered. Clive’s problems at the moment extend far beyond expulsion, believe me.” That responsibility taken care of, he directed Lynley and Havers to Clive’s room and went in search of the boy himself.

Clive saw that Lynley was looking at the photograph, and he grinned in response to the expression on Lynley’s face. “Me and Gran,” he said. “Can’t say she thought much of the mohawk.” He sat on the edge of the bed, yanked off his pullover, and began to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. The soft inner flesh of his left arm was disfigured by a tattoo, a misshapen skull and crossbones that looked as if it had been created by a penknife and india ink. “Wizard, isn’t it?” Clive asked when he saw that Lynley had noticed the tattoo. “Always had to keep it covered here at school. But I’ve found the ladies go rather hot for it. You know the sort of thing.”

“Roll the shirt sleeve down, Pritchard,” Lockwood said. “Now.” The Headmaster looked as if he smelled something foul. He crossed the room, unhooked the window, and thrust it open.

“One-two. Tha’s it, Locky.
Breathe
,” Clive Pritchard mocked as Lockwood stood before the open space. He left his shirt sleeves as they were.

“Sergeant,” Lynley said to Havers, ignoring the exchange between the boy and the Headmaster.

From years of saying it, Havers went through the routine of the caution by rote. Clive would not be obliged to say anything to them unless he wished to do so, but whatever he said might be put into writing and given in evidence against him.

Clive feigned surprised confusion at this, but his eyes couldn’t hide the fact that he understood the meaning behind those few official words. “Wha’s this?” he asked them. “Mr. Lockwood comes personally to fetch me from music—directly in the middle of my sax solo, by the way; I find the coppers in my bed-sit ogling my gran’s picture; and now I’m hearing the official caution.” He extended his foot, hooked it under the rung of the chair, and pulled it from beneath the desk. “Take a load off, Inspector. Or perhaps that expression would be better applied to the sergeant here.”

“Of all the blasted cheek…” Lockwood seemed at a loss for anything further to say to the boy.

Clive cocked a head at him but he spoke to Lynley, his questions deliberately ingenuous. “Why’s
he
here, anyway? What’s this to do with Morant?”

“Judge’s Rules,” Lynley replied.

“Rules about what?”

“Questioning suspects.”

Clive’s earlier smile of innocence disappeared. “You’re not here about…All right, the Headmaster played me the tape. I’ve heard it. So I’m out on my ear and there’ll be hell to pay with my dad, that’s for sure. But that’s it. Just a bit of rough-and-tumble with Harry Morant. He was a cheeky bloke. He needed a bit of straightening out. But that was the extent of it.”

Sergeant Havers was bent over the desk, writing. When Clive paused, she reached blindly for the chair, sat down, and continued. At the window, Lockwood folded his arms. Lynley spoke.

“How often do you visit the Sanatorium, Clive?”

“Sanatorium?” Clive repeated. He sounded nonplussed, but the repetition bought him time. “No more than anyone else.”

It was a non-answer. Lynley pressed on. “But you know about the off-games chits.”

“What about them?”

“Where they’re kept. What they’re used for.”

“Everyone knows that.”

“You’ve used them yourself, no doubt. Perhaps on a day when you didn’t want to go to games. Perhaps when you had something more important to do, like an exam to study for, a paper to write, prep to see to.”

“What if I did? That’s nothing different from what half the blokes in upper sixth are up to. Go to the San. Dandle Laughland for a quarter-hour. Look a bit lovesick over her for good measure. Pick up a chit. It happens every day, Inspector.” He grinned, as if developing renewed confidence. “Are you going to have the sergeant give the caution to everyone who’s done it? You’ll be here for a while if that’s your game.”

“So the chits are fairly easy to come by.”

“If you know what you’re about.”

“Blank chits as well? Chits that Mrs. Laughland hasn’t filled out yet or signed?”

Clive looked at his hands, picked deeply at the cuticle of his right index finger. He said nothing.

“Pritchard…” Lockwood said his name as an admonition. Clive’s answering look was a study in contempt.

“Those blank chits
are
easy to come by, aren’t they?” Lynley asked. “Especially if Mrs. Laughland is distracted at the moment by one of the other boys. Dandling her, as you said. So I imagine you took one of the off-games chits from her desk—perhaps more than one if the plan didn’t work out the first time through.”