Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  H.

  Barbara knew that this card was the tenth such communication from Lady Helen Clyde that Lynley had received in the last two months. Each previous one had been exactly the same, a friendly and amusing commentary upon one aspect of Greek life or another as Lady Helen moved gaily round the country in a seemingly endless journey that had begun in January only days after Lynley had asked her to marry him. Her answer had been a definitive no, and the postcards—all sent to New Scotland Yard and not to Lynley’s home in Eaton Terrace—underscored her determination to remain unfettered by the claims of the heart.

  That Lynley thought daily, if not hourly, about Helen Clyde, that he wanted her, that he loved her with a single-minded intensity were the facts which, Barbara knew, comprised the heretofore unspoken rationale behind his infinite capacity for taking on new assignments without protest. Anything to keep the howling hounds of loneliness at bay, she thought. Anything to keep the pain of living without Helen from knotting steadily, like a tumour within him.

  Barbara returned the card, retreated a few steps, and expertly sailed her part of their report into his In tray. The subsequent whoosh of air across his desk, the fluttering of his papers to the floor, woke him. He started, grimaced disarmingly at having been caught sleeping, rubbed the back of his neck, and removed his spectacles.

  Barbara plopped into the chair next to his desk, sighed, and ruffled her short hair with an unconscious energy that made most of it stand on end like bristles on a brush. She spoke. “Ah yes, do ye hear those bonny bells of Scotland calling to ye, lad? Tell me ye do.”

  His reply made its way past a stifled yawn. “Scotland, Havers? What on earth—”

  “Aye. Those wee bonny bells. Calling ye home to that land of malt. Those blessit smoky tastes of liquid fire…”

  Lynley stretched his lengthy frame and began to gather his papers together. “Ah. Scotland,” he replied. “Do I imagine this sentimental journey into the thistle is an indication that you’ve not tipped into your weekly allotment of alcohol, Sergeant?”

  She grinned and sloughed off Robert Burns. “Let’s pop round to the King’s Arms, Inspector. You can buy. Two of the MacAllan and we’ll both be singing ‘Coming Through the Rye.’ You don’t want to miss that. I’ve the very devil of a mezzo-soprano sure to bring tears to your lovely brown eyes.”

  Lynley polished his spectacles, replaced them on his nose, and began an examination of her work. “I’m flattered by the invitation. Don’t think I’m not. A proffered opportunity to hear you warbling touches me right to the heart, Havers. But surely there’s someone else here today into whose wallet you haven’t dipped your hand quite so regularly as mine. Where’s Constable Nkata? Didn’t I see him here this afternoon?”

  “He’s gone out on a call.”

  “More’s the pity. You’re out of luck, I’m afraid. I did promise Webberly this report in the morning.”

  Barbara felt a twinge of exasperation. He’d dodged her invitation more adroitly than she’d managed to phrase it. But she had other weapons, so she trotted out the first. “You’ve promised it to Webberly in the morning, sir, but you and I know he doesn’t need it for another week. Get off it, Inspector. Don’t you think it’s about time you came back to the land of the living?”

  “Havers…” Lynley didn’t change his position. He didn’t look up from the papers in his hand. His tone alone carried the implicit warning. It was a laying-down of boundaries, a declaration of superiority in the chain of command. Barbara had worked with him long enough to know what it meant when he said her name with such studied neutrality. She was barging into an area off-limits. Her presence was not wanted and would not be admitted without a fight.

  Well and good, she thought with resignation. But she could not resist a final sortie into the guarded regions of his private life.

  She jerked her head towards the postcard. “Our Helen’s not giving you much to go on, is she?”

  His head snapped up. He dropped the report. But the jarring ring of the telephone on his desk precluded reply.

  Lynley picked up the phone to hear the voice of one of the girls who worked reception in the Yard’s unfriendly grey-on-black marble lobby. Visitor below, the adenoidal voice announced without preliminaries. Bloke called John Corntel asking for Inspector Asherton. That’s you, I s’pose? Though why some people can’t ever keep a body’s proper name straight…even when a body takes to stringing names together like some flipping royal and expects reception to know each and every one so’s to sort it all out when old schoolmates come calling—

  Lynley interrupted this verbal tally of woes. “Corntel? Sergeant Havers will come down to fetch him.”

  He hung up upon a martyred voice asking him what he thought he’d like to be called next week. Would it be Lynley, Asherton, or some other dusty family title that he thought he’d try out for a month or two? Havers, apparently anticipating his request from what she had heard of the conversation, was already heading out of his office for the lift.

  Lynley watched her go, her wool trousers flapping round her stubby legs and a scrap of torn paper clinging like a moth to the elbow of her worn Aran sweater. He contemplated this unexpected visit from Corntel, a ghost from the past, to be sure.

  They’d been schoolmates at Eton, Corntel a King’s Scholar, one of the elite. In those days, Lynley recalled, Corntel had cut quite a figure among the seniors, a tall and brooding youth, very melancholy, favoured with hair the colour of sepia and a set of aristocratic features reminiscent of those endowed Napoleon on the romantically painted canvases by Antoine-Jean Gros. As if with the intention of holding true to physical type, Corntel had been preparing to take his A-levels in literature, music, and art. What had happened to him after Eton, Lynley could not have said.

  With this image of John Corntel in mind, part of Lynley’s own history, it was with some surprise that he rose to greet the man who followed Sergeant Havers into his office less than five minutes later. Only the height remained—two inches over six feet, eye to eye with Lynley. But the frame that had once allowed him to stand so tall and sure of himself, a promising scholar in the privileged world of Eton, was round-shouldered now, as if protecting him from the potential of physical contact. That was not the only difference in the man.

  The curls of youth had given way to hair close cropped to the skull and peppered with premature grey. That miraculous amalgamation of bone, flesh, contour, and colour that had resulted in a face speaking of both sensuality and intelligence now bore a pallor usually associated with sickrooms, and the skin looked stretched across the bones. His dark eyes were bloodshot.

  An explanation had to exist for the change that had come upon Corntel in the seventeen years since Lynley had last seen him. People did not alter so drastically without a central cause. In this case it looked as if a burning or a freezing at the core of the man, having destroyed that interior substance, now pushed forward to decimate the rest.

  “Lynley. Asherton. I wasn’t sure which name to use,” Corntel said diffidently. But the timidity seemed studied, a decision about salutations made well in advance. He offered his hand. It was hot, and felt feverish.

  “I don’t use the title much. Just Lynley.”

  “Useful thing, a title. We called you the Viscount of Vacillation at school, didn’t we? But where did that come from? I can’t even remember.”

  Lynley preferred not to. It stirred up memories. How they assaulted the protected regions of the psyche. “Viscount Vacennes.”

  “That was it. The secondary title. One of the joys of being the oldest son of an earl.”

  “Dubious joys at best.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Lynley watched the other man’s eyes sweep over the office, taking in the cabinets, the shelves and their books, the general disarray of his desk, the two American Southwest prints. They came to rest on the room’s single photograph, and Lynley waited for the other man to comment upon its solitary subject. Corntel and Lynley had both been at Eton with
Simon Allcourt-St. James, and since the photograph of him was more than thirteen years old, Corntel would no doubt recognise the jubilant face of that wild-haired young cricket player who was frozen in time, captured in that pure, exhilarating joy of youth with trousers ripped and stained, a sweater pushed above the elbows, and a streak of dirt on his arm. He was leaning against a cricket bat, laughing in sheer delight. Three years before Lynley crippled him.

  “St. James.” Corntel nodded. “I’ve not thought of him in ages. Lord. Time does go, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.” Lynley continued to study his old schoolmate curiously, noting the manner in which his smile flashed and disappeared, noting how his hands drifted to his jacket pockets and patted them down as if reassuring himself of the presence of some item he intended to produce.

  Sergeant Havers flipped on the lights to dispel the gloom of the late afternoon. She looked at Lynley. Stay or go? her eyes asked. He nodded her towards one of the office chairs. She sat, reached in her trouser pocket, brought out a packet of cigarettes, and shook out several.

  “Have one?” she offered Corntel. “The Inspector here’s decided to give up yet another vice—curse him for his sanctimonious desire to stop polluting the air—and I hate to smoke alone.”

  Corntel seemed surprised that Havers was still in the room, but he accepted her offer and produced a lighter.

  “Yes. I will. Thank you.” His eyes danced to Lynley and then away. His right hand rolled the cigarette against his left palm. His teeth gnawed momentarily at his lower lip. “I’ve come for your help,” he said in a rush. “I pray you’ll do something, Tommy. I’m in serious trouble.”

  2

  “A boy’s gone missing from the school, and as I’m his housemaster, I’m responsible for what’s happened to him. God, if something has…”

  Corntel explained himself tersely, smoking between scattered phrases. He was housemaster and head of English at Bredgar Chambers, an independent school tucked into a roll of land between Crawley and Horsham in West Sussex, little more than an hour’s drive from London. The boy in question—thirteen years old, a third former, and hence new to the school this year—was a Hammersmith child. The entire situation appeared to be an elaborate ruse orchestrated by the boy to allow him a weekend of perfect freedom. Except that something had gone wrong, somehow, somewhere, and now the boy was missing, had been missing for more than forty-eight hours.

  “I think he may be a runaway.” Corntel rubbed his eyes. “Tommy, I should have seen that something was bothering the boy. I should have known. That’s part of my job. Obviously, if he was determined to leave the school, if he’s been that unhappy all these months and I’ve failed to see it…God in heaven, the parents arrived at the school in a state of hysteria, one of the board of governors just happened by at the time, and the Headmaster has spent all afternoon trying to keep everything out of the hands of the local police, trying to keep the parents calm, and trying to find out who saw the boy last, and why, most of all why, he ran off without a word. I don’t know what to tell anyone, how to excuse…how to make reparation or find some sort of resolution.” He ran a hand back over his short hair, tried and failed to force a smile. “I didn’t know where to turn at first. Then I thought of you. It seemed an inspired solution. After all, we were mates back at Eton, you and I. And…Christ, I sound like an idiot. I can’t even think straight any longer.”

  “This is a matter for the West Sussex police,” Lynley replied. “If indeed it’s a police matter at all. Why haven’t they been called in, John?”

  “We’ve a group on the campus—called the Bredgar Volunteers. Isn’t that an absurd name?—and they’re out looking for him now, assuming that he’s not got that far. Or assuming that something happened to him nearby. It was the Headmaster’s decision not to send for the police. He and I spoke. I told him I had a contact here at the Yard.”

  Lynley could colour in the details of Corntel’s situation well enough. Beyond his legitimate concern for the boy, John Corntel’s job—perhaps his entire career—rested upon finding him quickly and finding him well. It was one thing for a child to be homesick, perhaps to make an attempt to go to his parents or his old friends, only to be stopped a short distance—and a short time—away from the school. But this was serious indeed. According to the halting details Corntel had given them, the boy had last been seen on Friday afternoon, with no one giving a thought as to his whereabouts since then. As to the distance he had probably managed to travel since that time…The situation was more than grave for Corntel. It was a prelude to professional disaster. No wonder he was assuring the Headmaster that he could handle it himself, discreetly, quickly, and well.

  Unfortunately, there was nothing that Lynley could do. Scotland Yard did not take on cases in this manner, and the force certainly did not step into the jurisdiction of the county police without a formal request from the regional constabulary. So Corntel’s trip into London was a waste of time and the sooner he got back to the school and got the case into the hands of the appropriate authorities, the better it would be. Lynley sought to convince him of this, gathering what disjointed facts he could, determined to use them to lead Corntel to the inescapable conclusion that the local police had to be involved.

  “What exactly happened?” he asked. Sergeant Havers, in rote reaction to her superior’s question, reached for a spiral notebook on Lynley’s desk and began jotting down questions and responses in her usual competent fashion. She squinted against the smoke from her cigarette, coughed, stubbed it out on the sole of her shoe, and tossed it into the rubbish.

  “The boy—Matthew Whateley—had an exeat this weekend to go to the home of another student, Harry Morant. Morant’s family has a country house in Lower Slaughter, and they’d arranged a gathering there for Harry’s birthday. Five of the boys were going, six including Harry. They had parents’ permission. Everything was in order. Matthew was one of them.”

  “Who are the Morants?”

  “Top drawer sort of family,” Corntel said. “Three older sons have gone through Bredgar Chambers. A sister’s in the lower sixth there now. We take girls in their last two years,” he added uselessly. “Lower and upper sixth girls. I think what happened is that Matthew got cold feet about the business because of that. I mean, because of the family—the Morants—not because we take girls at the school.”

  “I don’t see why. What’s the family got to do with it?”

  Corntel shifted in his seat with a look at Sergeant Havers. Lynley saw in that nervous sweep of the eyes what would be said next. Corntel had heard Havers’ distinct working class accent. If the Morants were being brought forward as the source of the problem—and were, as Corntel said, a top drawer family—then Matthew was no doubt, like Havers, from a distinctly different part of the chest.

  “I think Matthew got cold feet,” Corntel explained. “He’s a city boy, this is his first year in an independent school. He’s always been in the state schools before. He’s always lived at home. Now that he’s mixing with a different sort of people…it takes time. It’s difficult to adjust.” His hand moved out, open-palmed, in an appeal for mutual understanding. “You know what I mean.”

  Lynley saw Havers’ head come up, saw her eyes narrow at the implication behind Corntel’s words. She had, he well knew, always worn her working-class background like a suit of armour. “And when Matthew failed to show up for the journey on Friday? There must have been some meeting place where the boys gathered before they set off for their weekend together. Didn’t they wonder where he was? Didn’t they report to you when he didn’t show up?”

  “They thought they knew where he was. We had games Friday afternoon, and the trip to Lower Slaughter was scheduled afterwards. The boys are all on the same hockey team. Matthew didn’t show up for the game, but everyone thought it was in perfect order because the third form hockey master—Cowfrey Pitt, one of our teachers—had received a note from the Sanatorium, saying that Matthew had become ill and wouldn’t be there fo
r the game. When they heard this, the boys assumed that he wouldn’t be going on the weekend either. It seemed logical enough at the time.”

  “What sort of note was it?”

  “An off-games chit. Just a standard form from the Sanatorium with Matthew’s name on it. Frankly, it looks to me as if Matthew set the entire situation up in advance. He would get permission from home to leave campus and arrange it to look as if he were going to the Morants’. At the same time, he would have in his possession an off-games chit indicating that he was ill in the Sanatorium. But because the chit wasn’t legitimate, I would get no copy of it from the San. So I would think Matthew left with the Morants. The Morants, in the meantime, would think he was still at the school. Then the weekend would be his own to do as he liked. Which is exactly what he did, the little beggar!”

  “You didn’t check up on his whereabouts?”

  Corntel leaned forward and crushed out his cigarette. The movement was unsteady. Ashes spilled onto Lynley’s desk. “I thought I knew his whereabouts. I thought he was with the Morants.”

  “And the hockey master—was it Cowfrey Pitt?—didn’t inform you that he’d gone to the Sanatorium?”

  “Cowfrey assumed the San would let me know. That’s how it’s usually done. And if I’d been told Matthew was ill, I would have gone to the San to see him. Of course I would have.” The strength of Corntel’s protestations was curious. With each of them, the man spoke more intently.

  “You’ve a head of house as well, don’t you? What was he doing all this time? Was he in school this weekend?”

  “Brian Byrne. Yes. A senior boy. A prefect. Most of the seniors were off on exeats—at least those who hadn’t gone to a hockey tournament in the North—but he was there. Right in the house. As far as he knew, Matthew was with the Morants. He didn’t check into that any more than I did. Why should he have done so? If any checking was to be done, it was my responsibility, not Brian’s. I’ll not foist it off onto my prefect. I won’t.”