Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  “I…Thank you,” Deborah said to her. She reached impulsively for the girl’s hand, but Cecilia jerked away in a reflex reaction. She looked instantly apologetic. Deborah spoke again. “I’ve caused you no end of trouble by coming to use your phone, it seems.”

  “We’re the closest house,” Cecilia replied. “We’d be questioned anyway. As will most of the neighbours, I dare say. You had nothing to do with it.”

  “Quite. Yes. Well, thank you at any rate. Perhaps now you can get a bit of rest.”

  St. James saw the girl swallow. Her arms cradled her body. “Rest,” she repeated, as if the idea were entirely new to her.

  They left the house, crossed the driveway, and made for the road. St. James did not fail to notice that his wife walked more than a yard away from him. Her long hair shielded her face from his view. He sought something to say. For the first time in their marriage, he felt cut off from her. It was as if the month of her absence had created an unbreachable barrier between them.

  “Deborah. My love.” His words stopped her by the wrought-iron gate. He saw her reach out and grasp one of its bars. “You must stop trying to bear everything alone.”

  “It was finding him like that. One doesn’t expect to see a little naked boy lying dead beneath a tree.”

  “I’m not talking about the graveyard. You know that very well.” She averted her face. Her hand raised as if to stop him, then fell to her side. The movement was weak, and St. James berated himself for having allowed her to go off on her own so soon after she had lost the baby. No matter that she had been adamant about meeting her commitment to the photographic contract. He should have insisted upon more time for her to convalesce. He touched her shoulder, brushing his hand against her hair. “My love, you’re only twenty-four. There’s plenty of time. We’ve years ahead of us. Surely the doctor—”

  “I don’t want…” She released the bar of wrought iron and quickly crossed the street. He caught her up at his car. “Please, Simon. Please. I can’t. Don’t insist.”

  “Don’t you know I can see what it’s done to you, Deborah? What it’s continuing to do?”

  “Please.”

  He could hear her tears. They destroyed his own need, as they always would. “Then let me drive you home. We’ll come back for your car tomorrow.”

  “No.” She stood taller, offered a tremulous smile. “I’m fine. If we can just persuade the police to let me get at the Austin. We’ll both be far too busy tomorrow to want to make another drive out here.”

  “I don’t like the idea—”

  “I’m fine. Truly.”

  He could see how much she wanted to be away from him. After a month’s separation from her, he felt her continued need for isolation like the worst kind of blow. “If you’re sure.” It was a mere formality on his part.

  “I am. Completely.”

  The constable, who had disregarded their conversation by looking in the direction of the church, now turned and nodded them cooperatively across the police line. They walked down the lane, guided in the darkness by the lights set up near the incidents room, a police caravan round which a knot of scenes-of-crime men were packing evidence bags into their cases. A heavy-set man was just coming out of the police caravan as St. James and his wife reached Deborah’s car. He saw them, raised a hand in recognition, and joined them.

  “Inspector Canerone,” he said to St. James by way of introduction. “We met at Bramshill some eight months ago. You were giving a lecture on the recovery of accelerant residues.”

  “Dry forensic stuff, that,” St. James replied, offering the other man his hand. “Did you manage to stay awake?”

  Canerone grinned. “Only just. We’ve not a lot of arson to contend with round here.”

  “Just this mess.” St. James nodded towards the graveyard.

  The inspector sighed. The skin under his eyes looked permanently blue-black with fatigue, and his weight of flesh seemed too much for his body. “Little bloke,” he responded. “I’ve never made strides in getting used to the murder of a child.”

  “It is murder, then?”

  “Seems to be. Although there are some distinct incongruities. They’ve just gone out to bag him. Want to have a quick look?”

  With Deborah finally near, the last thing St. James wanted was to have any sort of look—quick or scrutinising or indifferent—at the body she had found. But forensic science was his field. He was a national authority. He could hardly shrug off the invitation with the excuse of having better things to do on a Sunday night, no matter how true an excuse it was at the moment.

  “Do go, Simon,” Deborah was saying. “I’ll just head on home. It’s been dreadful. I’d very much like to be on my way.”

  He felt the requisite answer rise. “I’ll see you in a bit, then, shall I?”

  “Dinner?” She made a little self-deprecatory gesture and added, “Except that I don’t imagine either of us shall want much to eat after this. Shall I arrange for something light?”

  “Something light. Yes. Fine.” He was beginning to feel like stone. He watched her get into the car, noticing how the interior light shone against her hair like gold upon copper, against her skin like the sheen of sunlight on cream. Then she closed the door, switched on the ignition, and was gone. He tore his eyes from the Austin’s path of departure. “Where’s the body?” he asked Canerone.

  “This way.”

  St. James followed the inspector not into the graveyard, but rather into Gray’s field which adjoined it. At one end, a monument to the poet loomed in the darkness. The ground was fallow with the end of winter; the earth gave off a rich, heady scent of humus. In another month it would be burgeoning with life.

  “No footprints here,” Canerone explained as they walked towards a wire fence overgrown by a hedge at the far end of the field. A hole had been cut through this, giving the police access to the second field beyond in which the body lay. “Looks as if the killer carried the body directly through the graveyard and dumped it over the wall. No other access.”

  “From the farm?” St. James indicated the lights of a house some distance across the field.

  “Again, no footprints. And three dogs on the premises who’d raise the devil if anyone came that way.”

  St. James appraised the copse of trees they were approaching. Lights bobbed beneath them. He could hear the quiet conversation of the police still there. Someone laughed. Like so many professionals, the Slough police had long ago become immune to the presence of violent death.

  Apparently, however, Canerone’s skin was thin when it came to that sort of thing. He said, “Excuse me, Mr. St. James,” and walked into the group of men under the tree. He spoke hotly for a moment. His arm swung out. Then he returned, his face impassive. Too close to the job, St. James thought. “Right. Come this way, if you will.”

  The men on the scene stood back to give St. James access to the body. Nearby, the police photographer was unloading his camera. He stopped, watched, lowered his equipment into the case at his feet.

  St. James wondered what they expected him to do. They could see the obvious as well as he, and anything beyond that would have to wait for the autopsy. He was no mystic, no magician. He had no special powers outside of his lab. Besides, he didn’t even want to be here at the moment in this dark, cold field with a night’s wind tossing its way through his hair as he stared down at the corpse of a child he didn’t know. It was hardly rational to assume that his personal perusal of this grim little scene would unveil the truth behind the child’s life and his death. Beyond that, at the moment, there was Deborah to consider, Deborah who had been gone for a month, who had left as his wife and returned a stranger. And worse, there was the condition of his heart, which felt torn with worry and completely alone.

  Still, he gazed upon the corpse. The colour of the skin suggested some sort of contaminant in the blood, possibly even an accidental death. But the condition of the body contravened this conclusion. As Canerone had said, there were incongruitie
s that only an autopsy could explain. Because of this, St. James settled upon saying the obvious, something any probationary DC could have said himself. He could tell it easily enough from the bruiselike stain that ran the length of the child’s left leg.

  “The body’s been moved. Sometime after death.”

  Next to him Canerone nodded. “What went on before death concerns me more, Mr. St. James. He was tortured.”

  4

  Lynley flipped open his ancient, dented pocket watch, saw that it was a quarter to eight, and admitted that he could hardly stretch his day very much longer. Sergeant Havers had already departed, their report was assembled and ready for presentation to Superintendent Webberly, and unless something happened to forestall his departure, he was going to have to go home.

  That he wanted to avoid this was something he freely admitted to himself. Home had provided neither escape nor sanctuary in the last two months. Rather, it had become an insidious adversary, throwing down the gauntlet of memory every time he walked in the door.

  For so many years he had lived without bothering to evaluate what Lady Helen Clyde actually meant in his life. She had simply always been there, breezing into his library with a shopping sack of detective novels which she insisted he read; appearing on his doorstep at half-past seven in the morning and browsing through his breakfast dishes as she chatted about her plans for the day; amusing him with mad anecdotes about her work in St. James’ forensic laboratory (“My God, Tommy darling, today the little beast was actually cutting up a liver while we were having our tea!”); travelling with him to his family home in Cornwall and riding across the fields and making life worthwhile.

  Every room in his house reminded him in some way of Helen. Save his bedroom. For Helen had been his friend, not his lover, and when she saw how intent he was to have her come to be more in his life than mere confidante and companion, she had left him.

  It would have been so convenient to have learned to despise her for running away. It would have been so much easier to take up with another woman and bury himself in the diversion of an affair. It wasn’t as if there were no women available for this sort of short-lived but engrossing encounter. Yet he found he wanted only Helen, with a longing that went beyond the desire to taste the fine warmth of her skin, to tangle his fingers in her hair, to feel the length of her body arch with pleasure against his own. He wanted a union to exist between them, one brought about through more than merely the momentary possession of her in his bed. While that union continued to be denied him, he stayed away from his home, engulfed in work, driven to fill up the hours with anything to keep himself from thinking of Helen Clyde.

  Still, in moments like this when the day’s conclusion caught him with his defences ill-placed, his thoughts turned to her instinctively, like wild birds seeking a familiar resting place to shelter them through the night. Yet the memory of Helen offered him no protection. Instead, it had become a tool that only served to gauge the depth of his loss.

  He picked up her postcard, read once more the cheerful words that he already had memorised, and tried to believe that they contained an underlying expression of love and commitment that a few minutes’ pondering would finally reveal. But he could not lie to himself. Her message was clear enough. She wanted time. She wanted distance. He upset the delicate balance of her equilibrium.

  Dispiritedly he shoved the postcard into his jacket pocket and accepted the inevitable reality of having to go home. As he rose, his eyes fell on the photograph of Matthew Whateley that John Corntel had left. Lynley picked up the picture.

  He was a distinctly attractive child, dark-haired, with skin the colour of blanched almonds and eyes so dark that they could have been called black. Corntel had said that the boy was thirteen, in the third form at Bredgar Chambers. He looked far younger, and his features were as sweetly defined as a girl’s.

  Lynley felt a stirring of discomfort as he studied the picture. He had been on the police force long enough to know what the disappearance of a child this lovely might mean.

  It would take only a moment to check the PNC. Since every police force in England and Wales was hooked into it, if Matthew had been found somewhere—either dead or alive and unwilling to identify himself—the computer would be carrying a full description in the hope that another police force might be able to identify the boy. It was worth a try.

  The computer room was manned at this hour by only one person, a detective constable whom Lynley recognised as a member of the robbery squad. He couldn’t recall his name at the moment. They nodded at one another casually but did not speak. Lynley went to one of the consoles.

  Because he wasn’t expecting to find anything that applied to the boy from Bredgar Chambers so soon after his disappearance, once he typed in the appropriate information, he watched the screen idly and thus almost missed the report that had been supplied from the Slough police: the body of a male child, brown hair, brown eyes, roughly nine to twelve years of age, in the vicinity of St. Giles’ Church, Stoke Poges. Cause of death presently unknown. Identity unknown. Noticeable scar four inches on left kneecap. Birthmark lower spine. Height four feet, six inches. Weight approximately six stone. Found at 5:05 P.M.

  His mind on other matters, all this actually rolled past Lynley, and the only reason he noticed it at all was that the name of the person who had discovered the body fairly leapt out at him at the end of the report. He caught his breath in sheer amazement as Deborah St. James, Cheyne Row, Chelsea appeared on the monitor.

  In the incidents room at St. Giles’ Church, Inspector Canerone checked the time. It was more than three hours since the body had been found. He tried not to think of it.

  He believed that, after eighteen years on the force, he ought to have become more immune to death. He ought to be able to look upon a corpse with some degree of impassivity, taking it not as a human being who had met a violent end but merely as a job to be done.

  After his last case, he thought that he had managed to find the balance he was seeking between professional detachment and human outrage. It had been simple enough to convince himself of that at the time. The body of a notorious pimp sprawled at the foot of a filthy staircase in a half-burnt tenement was hardly likely to inspire him to dwell very long on man’s inhumanity to man. Especially when part of him—the sententious Puritan within—believed that the pimp had got what he’d long deserved. When he first squatted by the body, saw the garrote round the neck, and felt unmoved by the sight, he even managed to convince himself that he’d arrived at that fine objectivity he had sought so long.

  Objectivity had disintegrated fast enough tonight, however. Canerone knew why. The child looked remarkably like his own son. There had even been a ghastly moment when he thought it was Gerald, when his mind swept through a swift series of impossible events beginning with Gerald’s decision that he could no longer live with his mother and her new husband in Bristol and ending with his death. The pieces fit together so neatly in Canerone’s imagination. His son would telephone the flat and, getting no answer, would run off to seek his father in Slough. He would be picked up on the roadside, held prisoner somewhere, and tortured to give someone a few minutes’ sadistic pleasure. When the torture was over—or perhaps before—he would die alone, afraid, abandoned. Naturally, once Canerone had got a good, clear look at the corpse, he could see that it wasn’t Gerald at all. But for a moment the terrifying possibility that it could be his son vanquished the indifference with which he believed he had to do his job. Now he was faced with the aftermath of that moment in which he had left himself unguarded.

  He saw his son rarely, telling himself that an occasional weekend was all that he could reasonably manage away from work. But that was a lie and he faced it now, with the scenes-of-crime men gone and the police surgeon escorting the corpse to the hospital and a solitary female probationary constable at a nearby desk, waiting for the word from him that she could pack up and go for the night. The truth was that he saw his son rarely because he could no longer
endure seeing him at all. Seeing him even in the most nonthreatening environment, he had to admit what he had lost, and admitting this, he came face to face with the emptiness that dominated his life now that his family had left him.

  He’d seen many police marriages dissolve through the years, but he had never once thought that his own might fall victim to the irregular hours, the load of work, and the sleepless nights intrinsic to a detective’s life. When he first noticed his wife’s unhappiness, he chose not to confront it, telling himself that she was a difficult woman, that if he was patient, it would all blow over, that she had it damned good being married to him at all, and with a temper like hers, who else would ever put up with her? Several men, it turned out, and one who married her, taking her to Bristol, taking Gerald as well.

  Canerone poured himself a cup of coffee. It looked too strong. He knew he would be up half the night if he drank it. He took a swift gulp, grimacing at the bitter flavour. His mind and his heart were filled to capacity with this little boy in the graveyard. The child’s wrists and ankles had been tightly bound; his body had been burned; he had been discarded like rubbish. He was so like Gerald.

  Canerone felt shaken. He couldn’t even have said what ought to be done first to bring about justice in the death of this boy. Such professional torpidity told him that he ought to give the case over to another DI. But he didn’t see how he could. He didn’t have the manpower.

  The telephone rang. From his position near the doorway, he listened to his police constable’s side of the conversation.

  “Yes, a little boy…. No, there’s no indication where he’s come from. It looks like a body dump at the moment…. It doesn’t appear to be exposure, sir. He’d been tied up, you see…. No, we’ve absolutely no idea at the moment who—” She hesitated, listening, her shapely eyebrows drawn together. Then she said only, “Let me put you through to the Inspector. He’s here.”