“From school.”
“I don’t understand—do you mean his old school? Your school?” Reluctantly, Caroline nodded.
“But when? How?”
It turned out that “some horrible big boys,” met Freddie every morning. “They turn out his pockets and his school bag, take what they want. They say they’ll beat him up if he tells.”
“Oh no!” Catherine thought of all the occasions when she had rebuked Freddie for losing things. “Why didn’t you tell me, Caroline, if he felt he couldn’t?”
“They said they’d beat me up as well.”
“Oh, God.” She clutched Caroline to her, wondering how she would ever be able to let her out of her sight again, wondering how children could be capable of such things.
“Well, it’s one good thing,” said the police sergeant. “It means he didn’t have any money after all, so he can’t have gone far. Not under his own steam anyway.”
“No news yet,” said Lucinda the next morning, putting the phone down. “Poor, poor Catherine. How on earth do you think she got through the night? And is there anything we can do for her?”
“Nothing,” Blue said. “The police are doing what they can. Bloody impressive they are, I asked them on the QT what about perverts and that, and the sergeant said they were already doing a search, any known ones in the area…”
“Blue, that’s so horrible.”
“Yes, I know, but it’s got to be faced.”
“I wonder if I should go over there or something—”
“No, don’t,” he said. “We’re not family, we’re not even close friends. We just happened to be there.”
“Yes, and it was so kind of you to stay, be so late for your dinner. She’s lovely, Catherine, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, she’s OK. Poor cow. Just think about it—no husband, no money, hardly any friends, far as I can make out, those fuckers after her—”
“Blue…”
“Well, they are. I’m sorry. And now her kid’s gone missing. Bloody awful. I hope those coppers question the other kids.”
“Yes, she said they were going to the school today.”
“God, children are evil. Poor little sod, being bullied on top of everything else.”
“Yes, I know. But at least he’s back at his nice little school now; he must be all right there.”
“Lucinda,” said Blue, “do you really think nobody gets bullied at ‘nice little schools’ as you call them? Children are savages, all of them, and being pushed into some poncey uniform and taught to speak nicely don’t make no difference at all. Believe me. Luft went to one of those schools, got bullied so badly, and by his housemaster an’ all, he says he’ll never get over it.”
“Yes, I see,” said Lucinda meekly.
Simon felt, absurdly he knew, guilty about Freddie. God, poor woman. What a nightmare her whole life was. He phoned Elizabeth to tell her about Freddie; she was very upset. “Simon, how dreadful. I’m so sorry. Poor, poor Catherine. I can’t think of anything worse. I still dread it daily, you know—something happening to one of the children. So much more terrible than it being us.”
“It rather puts everything into perspective, doesn’t it? Which reminds me—I’m asking a couple of agents to come and have a look at the house. Value it, you know. Hope that’s all right.”
“Yes, of course,” said Elizabeth.
“Good. Thanks. I know—well, I know how much you mind.”
“Oh, I know you do. And it’s all right.” She was so much happier suddenly, so astonished by the way they seemed to have moved together again, that nothing seemed quite so serious. And certainly, compared to the loss of a small boy, the sale of a house, however beloved, could not seem remotely important.
“Now, I just got a call from the solicitor. She wants to have a meeting this Friday afternoon with the barrister. Flora will be coming. All right if I ask her to stay the night with us?”
“Of course,” Elizabeth said. “It would be nice to spend a bit of time with her.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“No need to thank me. Oh, and Simon—”
“Yes?”
“Simon, lots of love.”
“And to you,” he said.
Catherine couldn’t imagine wanting to live any longer, unless Freddie were found. Somehow, she felt oddly hopeless. There was something about this whole thing that forbade positive thinking. It was the way Freddie appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth, the way no one had even seen him walking along the road…
“Um, is Joel Strickland in today?” Debbie tried to sound casual. Really, really casual. As you would if you were in a newspaper office, doing your job, and had a friend who worked there.
“Not sure.” Nicky Holt, assistant fashion and beauty editor of the News, looked at her coolly. Debbie had come in to tell her about the new body range with built-in deodorant that one of their clients was launching, and Nicky had clearly been underwhelmed by it. “He a friend of yours?”
“Sort of—yes.”
“Well, want to go along to his office? He might be there. Keeps funny hours, our Joel.”
“Oh, OK.” She was beginning to regret ever mentioning him. He probably wouldn’t remember her properly if he was there, and then she’d look really stupid.
“Know where his office is?” Nicky asked, and feeling even more stupid, she said no, she didn’t.
Nicky gave her a funny look and said, “Straight down through the news room, turn left, first office on the right.”
“OK, thanks.”
She managed to find the office without asking anyone else, and peeped in; he wasn’t there. It was an interesting office for a newspaper, quite different from the chaos of the fashion and beauty department, with its heaped-up sweaters and shoes and rails of clothes and mountains of bags. Joel’s office was very neat, with a computer screen showing City prices, and stacks of files and framed copies of various successful stories he’d done on the wall, including one that simply said WIPE OUT, in enormous red letters on the front page from the Monday after the crash and the great storm of ’87. She waited a moment or two in case he was with someone else and came back, but he didn’t.
She left then, feeling this was a clear sign from Fate that she was never destined to meet him again. And really, what would be the point if she did?
“Right then,” said Sergeant Lockyer, looking at the five boys: big, all of them, tough and aggressive, two of them quite spotty, grown out of their junior school and its gentle ways. “Which of you shall I talk to first?”
It was the usual story: they hadn’t meant any harm, Freddie should have been able to take a bit of teasing, they hadn’t realised they were upsetting him. They displayed a degree of bravado at first, then crumbled when Lockyer said he was going to get their parents in. That was when one of them, the biggest and spottiest, said, “If you really want to know who else was upsetting him, you might try the other lot. Those poshoes up the road, the ones Freddie went running back to.”
Chapter 24
JUNE 1990
Catherine wasn’t sure what would be the worst of the things that might have happened to Freddie: she forced herself to face them one by one, feeling that since he might be enduring them, then so must she. Abduction, abuse, murder—each one worse than the last. She kept thinking of her son as she had last seen him, before she left for Ascot; he had been smiling, so cheerful—and so brave, as she now knew, having learned of the bullying. How could her beautiful, clever, courageous little boy have suffered this awful thing? How could the life she had made for him so carefully, filled with the things that she felt mattered, with books, with music, with friends, with fun—and they had managed to have fun, in spite of everything, the three of them—how could that life have turned so ugly, so treacherous?
As the second ghastly night finally ended, Catherine began to lose hope. And running through her fear was an ongoing seething rage at Lloyd’s. Whose fault she felt the whole thing undeniably was.
Sergeant Lockyer didn’t like Donald Archer, the head of Lynton House. He was rampantly complacent. “I don’t know where you got this story from, but it can’t be correct. We simply don’t tolerate bullying here,” he said, peering over his half-moon glasses at Lockyer. “It’s one of the reasons for our success, why parents choose Lynton House above most of the other private schools in the neighbourhood. And our academic record, of course.”
“We got it from a child at St. Joseph’s who has a brother here. It was confirmed by Freddie Morgan’s younger sister. And I might add that the boy had been driven to calling ChildLine about it.”
Donald Archer looked very shocked. “I don’t know what to say,” he said finally.
“What I’d like you to say, and to Freddie’s class initially, is that he has disappeared, possibly run away, that you have been informed of bullying by members of the school which could have been a factor, and it is essential that we are able to talk to those responsible.”
“I don’t know that I could agree to that. I don’t get the connection, to be frank with you.”
“Really? The bottom line of the connection, you might say, is that your boys would be treated as suspects.”
“What—in Freddie Morgan’s disappearance? But that’s absurd!”
“It might seem absurd to you, Mr. Archer, but that is how we have to proceed with cases like this. So could you call them together. Oh, and please stress that covering up for friends and so on is not an option. This is a matter of life and death. Or,” he added, “we could say it for you.”
Nigel was doing some fairly ugly calculations when Lucinda phoned. It was becoming perfectly clear that he was going to have to sell the farm—or most of it. And having done that, he would remain in desperate trouble. If he still owned it, he would have had to sell the house in Cadogan Square as well, just to have some money to live on: but that was in trust for Lucinda. For the time being. And anyway, what would he be able to buy? God, he felt as if he was being sucked down into a whirlpool of panic and fear, and slowly drowning.
“Nigel, hello. It’s me.”
“Oh—yes. Hello, Lucinda.” He wasn’t sure he could bear to talk to her at the moment.
“How are you?”
“Bit worried, actually.”
“I’m sorry. What about?”
“Oh, nothing much. Just a few hundred thousand pounds to find, you know the sort of thing.” His voice sounded bitter even to himself.
“Well, that’s exactly what I’m ringing about. My solicitor has written a brilliant letter and he’s sending it to yours, OK? Stating what I—we—need.”
“Oh yes?”
“And you’ve got to stick to the plan, Nigel. No weakening. All right?”
“Have…have you told your Mr. Horton about this?”
“Of course I have. He’s perfectly happy with it.”
“Really? All of it? Even the…well, you know, the difficult part?”
“Well—yes. I mean, he’s agreed in principle and honestly, the rest is just small print, isn’t it?”
Nigel agreed it might be called that; while thinking that Horton was exactly the sort of person to read small print very carefully. And not be entirely pleased with what it said.
“So, just sit tight, all right? Everything’s going to be absolutely fine.”
“Yes, all right,” he said. He was hating this whole thing, so deeply did it go against his instincts.
“Good. Now Nigel, such awful news. Do you remember Catherine, Catherine Morgan? She was at that Lloyd’s meeting, the first one that we went to, pretty girl. She spoke—she was the widow, with two young children. Had lived in Hong Kong.”
“Um…yes. What’s happened to her?”
“It’s not her, it’s her little boy, Freddie. He’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared? How terrible. Where?”
“Well, from his home in Fulham. The day before yesterday, after Ascot. The police are involved and everything, but there’s been no sign of him at all yet. I feel so desperately sorry for her and I just wish there was something I could do.”
“What a ghastly thing,” said Nigel. “I’m so sorry. If you’re in touch with her, do please give her my—my sympathy, will you?”
“Yes, of course. I’d suggest you rang, but I suppose every time the phone rings she thinks it might be news, so best not to really.”
“Yes. Probably. Anyway, I don’t really know her at all and it’s a very private situation, I’d have thought. Oh dear. What a rotten world.”
“Totally rotten,” said Lucinda.
Nigel had never known the joys and anguishes of parenthood, but suddenly even losing his farm didn’t seem quite so important.
In a scene which Blue Horton would have delighted in playing before Lucinda, three boys from Lynton House had been brought to the headmaster’s study. (“Appalling,” Donald Archer said afterwards. “Some of my brightest boys—scholarship to Winchester, one of them.”) One, the smallest, had owned up of his own volition, and then his best friend had sneaked (as he put it) on the other two.
“It was only teasing,” said the oldest boy defensively, “that’s all.”
“And what form did this teasing take, exactly?”
“Well…” The small one blushed violently. “Well, it was mostly about—about money, actually. He had to leave Lynton, you know, because his mother couldn’t pay the fees anymore, and he went to the state school down the road.”
“And you teased him about that? Doesn’t sound very amusing to me,” said Lockyer.
“No, no, of course not. We were jolly sorry for him, anyone would be. But then when he came back he was a bit—different. Sort of—boastful. Said his mother was working for a big banker chap in the City, that everything was all right now.”
“Oh yes?” God, children were complex creatures. “So…” Lockyer turned to the biggest boy. “What happened next?”
“Well, it was all a bit odd really. I mean, there obviously wasn’t any money, he was still living in the same grotty little place and he didn’t have much of the proper kit for anything and he couldn’t come on the trip to France we were all going on.”
“So you teased him about that?”
“Well, we didn’t exactly tease him.”
“Were you nice to him then?”
“Yes. Sort of.”
“You were nice to him. Funny he should have run away then. I fear we might have to involve your parents in this, if you can’t cooperate a bit more. This is very, very important you know, it isn’t some game.”
Silence.
Lockyer turned to Donald Archer. “Perhaps you could call the boys’ parents.”
“No, don’t do that.” It was the third boy. “OK, we did rag him a bit, but it was his fault. We wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been so full of himself.”
“You ragged him, as you put it, about not having what the rest of you had got. I see. Anything else?”
“Well, he was a bit of a goody-goody. Toadied up to the masters, that sort of thing. So—yes, there was that. And then he was always arriving at school without his packed lunch and stuff like that. He really was pretty hopeless.”
“Right.” Lockyer looked at Donald Archer then back at the boys. “It didn’t occur to you, obviously, that he’d been trying to tough it out, that he was ashamed of not having the proper kit as you call it, of having to leave for financial reasons?”
Silence.
“I’d have thought it would be better to try to help someone who was having problems, who was ‘pretty hopeless’ as you put it, not…er…rag them. I’m sure your headmaster would agree with me.”
“Er, yes,” said Archer. “Yes, absolutely. Those are the values we do encourage here. Naturally.”
“Well, that’s good. I’m pleased to hear it. Anything else?”
“Not really. Except recently, he started saying he’d liked it at the state school, that the boys had been quite good eggs, that we were a load of snobs, sort of thing,
so we said, ‘Bug off back there then.’”
“I see,” said Lockyer. “Did you know he was so desperate he was calling ChildLine?”
“ChildLine! No,” said the biggest boy. “Of course we didn’t.”
“Well, I suppose that’s something. So do any of you have any idea at all where he might have gone? Know anyone he knew, either inside or outside school, that we should talk to?”
They all shook their heads; they looked very uncomfortable. “Honestly, sir,” said the biggest boy. “Honestly, if we knew, we’d tell you.”
Reluctantly, Lockyer was forced to believe them.
Chapter 25
JUNE 1990
Simon sat staring at this person who quite literally held his fate in his hands and hoped Fiona Broadhurst knew what she was doing. He had not expected this tall, blond patrician, with that odd mixture of clipped and drawling accent that characterises the Old Etonian. He had somehow expected Fiona to produce something rather different, a bit of an oddball even, after all her protestations of wanting them to work as a team and not regard the barrister as the member of some superior race. Lindsay-Cowan QC did not seem to him a team player at all. He smiled at them all, rather graciously, indicated to them to sit down on the shabby leather sofas that lined his chamber walls, and asked them if they would like China or Indian tea. That settled, he spoke. And Simon immediately felt better.
“Right,” he said, “now the first thing I want to say is that we may get these bastards and we may not, but if we don’t I shall certainly enjoy trying. Although I can see it may be rather less enjoyable for you. Especially if we don’t win. But if we do win, of course, we shall be making history. There are literally hundreds of these cases being prepared even as we speak. Or rather as I speak. I’m sure you are aware that seventy percent of losses have fallen on thirty percent of Names. I think those figures speak for themselves. They cannot be attributed to coincidence.
“Now one of three things will happen. We will win outright. Unlikely. We will lose. Very possibly. We shall get settlement. Moderately likely. Although not as likely as that we shall lose.”
An Absolute Scandal Page 28
