Well-Schooled in Murder (50 page)

After seeing them off in the direction of Calchus House, Lynley re-entered the main school building, crossed the foyer, and walked into the quad. He passed beneath the statue of Henry VII whose unyielding marble features spoke smugly of victory won at the cost of betrayal. The thought of that five-hundred-year-old conquest and the acts of treachery which had made it possible slowed Lynley’s steps momentarily, giving him pause to think about his past association with John Corntel and how that past association called out to dictate his behaviour now. Tradition demanded loyalty from him, while treachery only promised to come attended by its faithful companion, regret. Had that not been the lesson learned by those who had betrayed their anointed king on the field of battle? As individuals, their gain had been but a fleeting bagatelle. Their loss was infinite.

Lynley thought of his present predicament with a measure of self-derisive amusement. How easy it was to demand and expect an eighteen-year-old boy like Chas Quilter to cast off the chains of custom and point the finger of accusation at a schoolmate. When the tables were turned, how difficult it was to expect of oneself that same level of unbending moral rectitude. The manila envelope Lynley carried, so insubstantial a physical burden earlier in the morning, felt weighted by lead.

Whited sepulchre to be sure
, he thought in disgust and followed the cobbled path to the dining hall.

Its size was vast, a room capacious enough to hold the entire school at once. They were gathering at refectory tables, arranged by house, with the older students at one end, the younger at the other, the housemaster at the head, and the house prefect at the foot.

The noise bordered on intolerable, six hundred pupils shouting, laughing, and talking all at once. All conversation ceased, however, when Chas Quilter mounted the steps of a monastic-looking podium and began to read aloud from scripture. Lynley waited until Chas had finished the brief passage before he crossed to the tables designated for Erebus House. The roar of voices resumed again as food carts were wheeled out from the kitchen.

Corntel had gone to the end of the table where he was shouting some instructions into Brian Byrne’s ear. The Erebus House prefect nodded, as if he were listening, but Lynley saw that his eyes followed Chas Quilter as the other boy made his way to the table where the Ion House boys sat. For a moment after Corntel had stopped speaking, Brian’s gaze remained fixed on Chas, a tic pulling at a muscle in the corner of his mouth.

By the time Lynley reached John Corntel, the other man had seen him coming. Perhaps reading Lynley’s intention upon his face, Corntel suggested that they go to his classroom rather than talk in front of the pupils. It was quite near, he explained, just above, on the first floor in the humanities section.

With a final set of instructions to Brian Byrne, Corntel led the way out of the dining hall. They climbed the worn stone stairs in the west foyer and walked without speaking to Corntel’s classroom on the corridor that ran the length of the building, south to north. The room overlooked the vast playing fields on which an abandoned football lay beside a goal post. Lynley looked out the window, noting that the sky was growing progressively darker as storm clouds moved in their direction from the west.

He couldn’t decide how to confront his old schoolmate, reluctant to come face to face with an aberration of character that he found both incomprehensible and unquestionably repugnant. There didn’t seem to be an appropriate manner in which to begin the conversation. He turned from the window and saw the blackboard.

Phrases covered it. Lynley read through them as Corntel watched him from a position near the door.
Ironic reference to mercy; daughter versus ducats; the price of enmity; moral worth; realistic grievances; repetition of blood imagery
. At the top of the board, Corntel had written, “The villainy you teach me I will execute.”

“
The Merchant of Venice?
” Lynley asked.

“Yes.” Corntel advanced into the room. The desks were arranged in a horseshoe to facilitate discussion between students and teacher. He stood by one of these, as if waiting for permission to sit. “I’ve always liked the play. That delicious hypocrisy of Portia. Speaking eloquently of mercy. Knowing none herself.”

It was the opening Lynley needed. “I wonder if that’s a theme in your own life as well.” He went to Corntel and handed him the envelope. A desk separated them, but in spite of its presence—like a convenient bulwark—Lynley could sense the stress in the other man.

Obviously striving for lightness, Corntel asked, “What is this, Tommy?”

“Open it.”

As Corntel did so, he started to speak. Whatever words he intended to say, however, passed into nothing when he saw the nature of the photographs. Like Emilia Bond earlier, he pulled out a chair. But unlike the chemistry mistress, he did not attempt to explain away ownership of the pornography.

Instead, he looked stricken. His words explained the source of his pain. “She gave them to you. She
gave
them…”

Lynley knew he could spare him at least part of the mortification. “No. A boy saw her trying to burn them late Saturday night. He handed them over. She tried to deny they were yours.”

“She can’t lie, can she? Not Em.”

“I don’t think she can. That’s greatly to her credit.” Corntel had not looked up from the pictures. Lynley saw that the other man had begun to clutch them. “Can you explain them to me, John? You must know how bad it looks that you had them in the first place.”

“Not the sort of thing one wants to find in a teacher of children. Especially under the present circumstances.” Still Corntel did not lift his head. As he spoke, he began leafing through the pictures slowly. “I’ve always wanted to write, Tommy. Isn’t that every English teacher’s dream? Don’t we all say we
could
write that book if we only had the time or the discipline or the energy once our papers are marked? And this—these pictures—they were the first step.” He used hushed tones to relay the information, like a man speaking after the act of love. He continued to go through the pictures. “I know I deliberately chose a sensational subject. For ease of publication, that sort of thing. But one has to start somewhere. It didn’t seem like such an awfully dishonest way to begin. I realise how little artistic integrity is inherent to such a project. Still, I thought it would give me a foot in the door.” His words were growing slower, more dazed, hypnotic. “And then I could go on. I could write…write to my passion. Yes, to my passion. That’s what good writing is, isn’t it? An act of passion. An act of joy. A kind of ecstasy that others only dream of, that others don’t even know exists…. And these pictures…these pictures…”

Corntel traced the figure of one of the naked children. He moved a finger to the aroused adult. He played it along the man’s muscular thighs to his groin, across his chest, and up to his lips. He went to another picture and did much the same, lingering over the unnatural mating between child and adult with a misty smile.

Observing, Lynley said nothing. He couldn’t have found the words had he tried. Corntel may have hidden himself behind the convenient intention of writing a novel. But the truth was exposed in the pulse that beat rapidly in his temple, in the manner in which he ran his tongue over his lips, in the rapture of his voice. Lynley felt a surge of disgust pass over him. It was followed by pity, profound and deep.

Corntel roused himself and saw that Lynley was watching him. He dropped the pictures. They spread out on the desk.

“God,” he whispered.

Lynley found his voice. “I’ve a little boy dead, John, a boy not much older than these in the pictures. He was tied up. He was tortured. He was…God knows what else.”

Corntel pushed away from the desk and walked to the windows. He looked out at the playing fields. This seemed to give him the courage to turn and begin to speak. “I began collecting the pictures on a trip to London,” he said. “When I saw my first one—in a very private section of an adult bookshop in Soho—I was appalled. And fascinated. And drawn to it. I bought it. And then others. At first, I took them out only on holidays, away from the school. Then I allowed myself an evening once a month in my study, with the curtains drawn. It didn’t seem so bad. Then once a week. Then, finally, almost every night. I’d look forward to it. I’d…” He looked back outside. “I’d have a glass of wine. I’d…Candles, I lit candles. I imagined…What I told you at first isn’t so far from the truth. I imagined stories about them. Stories. I named them. The boys. Not the adults.” He went back to the pictures. “This boy was Stephen,” he explained, pointing to a child who was bound and gagged on an antique brass bed. “And this…this was Colin. And I called this one Paul. And Guy. And William.” He reached for another. His courage seemed to falter. “And this one. I called this one John.”

It was the only picture in which two adults were featured, both of them abusing a powerless child. Although he had seen it already, there was no escaping the awful weight of meaning behind Corntel’s giving the child his own Christian name.

“John,” he said, “you need—”

“Help?” Corntel smiled. “That’s for people who don’t know their disease. I know mine, Tommy. I always have. Look how it’s demonstrated in the way I’ve lived my life. Giving over power to anyone who wanted it—my father, my mother, my schoolmates, my superiors. Never taking action on my own. Incapable of doing so.” Corntel dropped the pictures. “Even with Emilia.”

“Her story about Friday night isn’t the same as yours, John.”

“No. It wouldn’t be. I’m…Tommy, I had to tell you something, didn’t I? I knew you’d eventually discover how upset she was when she left me Friday night, so I invented a reason. Impotency seemed…I had to, didn’t I? And what difference does it make? What I told you was as near to the truth as…Shall I tell you now? It was…We managed it. Just. She was very kind.”

“She didn’t act as if it had anything to do with kindness.”

“She wouldn’t. That’s not her way. She’s a good person, Tommy. When she saw how difficult it…everything was for me, she managed it all. I let her. I gave her control over everything. And when she came back Saturday night and asked for the photographs—demanded them, actually—I gave them over as well. It seemed the best way I could make reparation for who I am, for what I am. Not a normal man, really. Not anything at all.”

Lynley wanted to ask Corntel a hundred questions. More than anything, he wanted to understand how a young man possessed of such a brilliant future had evolved into what he saw before him now. He wanted to understand what would make a world of distorted fantasy more attractive than a vital connection with another human being. Part of the answer, he already knew. There was safety in the life of imagination, no matter how deviant that life actually was. There was no risk involved. One’s inner being was never really touched, so one’s heart would never be pierced or bear scars. But the rest of the answer remained locked in Corntel, perhaps inexplicable even to himself.

He felt a need to offer his old schoolmate some sort of comfort, to lessen his shame at having been thus exposed. He said, “Emilia loves you.”

Corntel shook his head. He gathered up the pictures and replaced them in the envelope, which he handed to Lynley. “She loves the John Corntel she created. The real man she doesn’t even know.”

Lynley descended the stairs slowly. He brooded over each exchange he’d had with John Corntel, feeling as if, for the last few days, he’d become a spectator caught up in a shifting drama in which Corntel acted out several roles from behind a continuing altering mist.

He’d come to London in the role of housemaster, guiltridden over the disappearance of Matthew Whateley. There, he had been a man seeking help, accepting full blame for his part in a series of institutional failures that had culminated in the boy’s vanishing from the school. But in spite of the guise of cooperation he had worn, he had not been willing to reveal the distraction which had kept him from seeing to Matthew’s welfare during the weekend that had passed.

Emilia Bond had been that distraction, and out of Corntel’s relationship with her rose the second role he played—the lover plagued by humiliation. No matter the contents of his personal disclosures to Lynley, the emotion behind them was always the same. Whether alleging a failure to perform adequately in bed or confessing that Emilia Bond had guided their lovemaking, it made no difference. Humiliation was the outcome, and under that humiliation was buried a plea for pity and understanding that Lynley had not failed to hear. He recognised it again when Corntel adopted the third role in their drama.

In the collector of pornography, Corntel portrayed the pathetic neurotic. More, in giving his name to one of the children in the photographs, he went a step further. He painted himself as a victim, not a perpetrator, and asked Lynley to believe that such was the case. Yet all of it seemed too convenient at the moment. All of it had fallen into place too well. For although Corntel had developed an elaborate fantasy world round his photographs, Lynley knew that the loneliness of such an existence might have prompted him to seek reality at last. If the reality that was Emilia Bond had proved a disappointment to the man, what was to prevent Corntel from seeking an actuality that more closely resembled the unhealthy world of his dreams? What was to prevent him from making Matthew Whateley part of that experience?

Surely Corntel knew he had not been eliminated as a suspect merely because he had been forthcoming with bits and pieces of his personal torments. Even if Lynley had been able to dismiss his suspicions, Corntel couldn’t believe he would do nothing about the photographs tucked under his arm. They should, by rights, go to the Headmaster. Whether or not Corntel was guilty of Matthew Whateley’s death, Lockwood should be the one to decide what to do about the man. It was his job, after all. It was his responsibility.