Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  Barbara knew her mother might go on in this disjointed fashion for an hour or more. She had often done so, sometimes coming into her bedroom at two or three in the morning to chat aimlessly, unmindful of Barbara’s entreaties that she return to her bed.

  “The bath,” Barbara reminded her. “I’m going to check on Dad.”

  “Dad’s well today, lovey. Such a man. So well. See for yourself.”

  That said, Mrs. Havers flitted back out of the light. In a moment water began to splash noisily into the bath. Barbara waited to see if her mother would leave the tub unattended, but apparently the idea of watching the water had been planted well enough in her mind to ensure her staying put for at least a few minutes. Barbara went to the sitting room.

  Her father was in his usual chair, watching his usual Sunday night programme. Newspapers covered most of the floor where he had dropped them once he’d given them his usual cursory read. He, at least, was more predictable than her mother. He lived by routine.

  Barbara watched him from the doorway, tuning out the raucous roar of a commercial for Cadbury chocolates on the television, concentrating instead on the aqueous sound of his breathing. It had become more laboured within the last two weeks. The oxygen fed to him through the omnipresent tubes no longer seemed sufficient.

  Perhaps feeling his daughter’s presence, Jimmy Havers pushed himself to one side in his old wing-backed chair.

  “Barbie.” As always, he smiled a greeting, showing teeth that were cracked and blackened. But for once Barbara noticed neither this nor the fact that his hair was unwashed and greasily malodorous. Rather, she saw that his colour was bad. There was no pink to his cheeks; his fingernails were turning a misty grey-blue. She didn’t have to cross the room to see that the veins in his arms looked shrunk to nothing.

  She walked to the tank on its trolley by his chair and adjusted the oxygen flow. “We’ve the doctor tomorrow morning, haven’t we, Dad?”

  He nodded. “Tomorrow. Half-nine. Got to be up and about with the birds, Barbie.”

  “Yes. With the birds.” Fleetingly Barbara mulled over how she would manage this scheduled trip to the doctor with both her parents. She’d been dreading it for weeks. It was inconceivable that her mother should be left alone in the house while she took her father to the doctor. Anything could happen if Mrs. Havers found herself unsupervised for more than ten minutes at a time. Yet the idea of having them both to contend with was overwhelming—her father’s oxygen supply, his virtual immobility thrown against her mother’s tendency to wander off and lose herself blissfully in the crystal cave of her dementia. How was she going to do it?

  Barbara knew it was time for some sort of help. Not a well-meaning social worker who’d stop by to make sure the house was still standing, but a permanent live-in. Someone reliable. Someone who would take an interest in her parents.

  It was impossible. It couldn’t be managed. There was nothing to be done save muddling on. The thought was suffocating, a nightmare glimpse into a future with neither hope nor end.

  When the telephone rang, she trudged into the kitchen to answer it, doing her best not to let her heart sink any lower when she saw the unwashed breakfast dishes with their smears of dried egg still cluttered on the table. The caller was Lynley.

  “We’ve a murder, Sergeant,” he announced. “I’ll need you to meet me at the St. James house at half-past seven tomorrow.”

  Barbara knew that a brief request on her part for time off would be met with Lynley’s immediate acquiescence. While she’d been careful never to reveal the truth of her living circumstances to him, the number of hours that she’d spent on the job in the last few weeks had certainly garnered her several days of freedom. He knew that. He would not even stop to question such a request. She wondered what was preventing her from making it, but even in the act of wondering, she recognised her self-deception. A new case tomorrow promised at least a moment’s reprieve from the inevitable struggle with her parents in the morning, from the endless trip to the doctor, from the anxious wait to be called into his office while all the time she kept her mother in rein like a fractious two-year-old. A new case obviated the necessity of going through all that. It was licence to avoid, permission to procrastinate.

  “Havers?” Lynley was saying. “Did you get that?”

  Now was the time to make the request, to explain the situation, to say that she needed a few hours—perhaps a day—to take care of some personal business at home. He would understand. All she need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it.

  “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.”

  He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation.

  She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day.

  Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames.

  He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so.

  He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been.

  Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited.

  He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the job, in spite of the fact that the pay was lower than what she’d received for years at the Blue Dove. No boy wants to tell his mates that his mum’s a barmaid.

  No indeed, Kevin had agreed.

  They’d bring their son up proper, they decided. He’d have more opportunity than they’d had. He’d have a solid education and a chance to make something grand of his life. They owed it to him, after all, and they knew it. He was their miracle baby. He was their dear little chap. He was the bond between them. He was the living fulfillment of all their dreams, dreams brought to nothing on that stainless steel cart in the hushed postmortem room where Kevin had been taken to identify the body.

  Matthew had been covered by some sort of regulation green cloth, the incongruous words LEWISTON LAUNDRY AND CLEANING stamped across the front, as if he were waiting to be bundled into a washing machine. Although the quietly sympathetic police sergeant had uncovered the face, there had been no real need for him to do so. Sometime in the process of moving the body from one location to another, the left foot had become loosened from the material that enshrouded it, and Kevin knew at once that he was looking at his son.

  It was odd to think that one could know a child’s body so well, that merely the g
limpse of a foot could wreak such horrible devastation. But that had been enough. Still, he had done his duty and made a formal observation of the rest of the body.

  Kevin thought of the sight of Matthew’s face, the glow wiped from it by the impartial hand of death. He had heard once that people’s faces reflected the manner in which they died. But he knew now that old tale wasn’t true. Matthew’s body bore evidence of brutality and violence, but his face was serene. He might have been asleep.

  Kevin had heard himself asking the impossible, the ridiculous, the unutterably laughable. “The boy’s dead? You’re sure of it?”

  The sergeant had lowered the cloth to cover Matthew’s face. “Quite sure. I’m sorry.”

  Sorry. What did he know of Matthew to be sorry at his death? What did he know of the railway they’d built together in the cellar, or the buildings they’d constructed to comprise the three villages through which their trains rolled? How could he know that Matthew had insisted each building be accurately designed to scale, be built of authentic materials, not of plastic? How could he know of the years it had taken them to complete it? Or the hours of pleasure they had got from the work? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. All he could do was mutter words of sympathy that would be forgotten as soon as Mattie was lowered into the ground.

  That little body on the stainless steel cart. Waiting for the knife that would cut through muscle and tissue, that would remove organs for examination, that would seek and probe and relentlessly investigate until a cause of death was found. What did it matter? Putting a name to his death would not give him life. Matthew Whateley. Thirteen years old. Quite dead.

  Kevin felt the sob like a constriction in his chest. He fought it down. Dimly he heard time called in the pub, and it was in a fugue that he made his way outside into the night.

  He turned towards his home. Ahead of him by the embankment wall stood a green rubbish bin, and he approached this dully. Sunday-afternoon strollers had filled it with an assortment of wrappers and bottles, empty tins and newspapers, a bedraggled kite.

  Here, Dad, let me! Let me fly it! Let me!

  “Matt!”

  The word rent Kevin’s body, as if part of his spirit were clawing to be free. He bent, felt the rim of the rubbish bin beneath his hands.

  Let me fly it! I can! Dad, I can! I can!

  Kevin broke. His fingers dug and scratched at the bin. He picked it up, hurled it down onto the pavement, and fell upon it, beating it with his fists, kicking at it with his feet, driving his head into its metal sides.

  He felt his knuckles split. His feet became entangled in foul-smelling rubbish. Blood from his forehead began to drip into his eyes.

  But he did not cry.

  5

  Deborah St. James had fallen into a fitful sleep sometime after three-fifteen. She awoke shortly before half past six to find that her body ached with the rigid tension that had kept her from instinctively seeking her husband during the night.

  Behind the curtains the morning sun created a dusky glow in the room. It settled upon furniture, transforming drawer pulls from base brass and enamel into russet gold. It washed over photographs, creating round each a visible aura of light. It drove out shadows and gave full definition to night-amorphous shapes.

  This same light cast a thin diagonal beam across Simon’s form, illuminating his right hand, which lay, unmoving, on the bed between them. As Deborah watched, his fingers curled into his palm and then extended. He was awake.

  Only six weeks ago at this first waking, she would have slid across the bed and into his arms. She would have felt his hands knowing all of her body and his mouth tasting the dawn on her skin. She would have heard him murmur my love as she bent over him and let her hair sweep a skeinlike pattern across his chest. She would have seen his smile as he touched her abdomen and whispered a good morning to their growing child. And their lovemaking at this early hour would have been not so much passion as affirmation and joy.

  Her body yearned for him, her nerves glass-edged and longing to be soothed by his touch. She turned to look at him, only to find that he was already looking at her. How long he had been doing so she could not have said. But as they gazed at one another across the expanse of their bed, Deborah took the full measure of how completely her past was obliterating whatever future was possible with her husband.

  She had not thought of it in those terms at the time. Eighteen years old, pregnant, a student alone in a foreign country. Having a baby under those circumstances would have been more than an irritating inconvenience to which one learns to adjust. It would have been an impossibility, a complete disaster. More, it would have ended her professional life before it had begun. At the time, the promise of her profession had been paramount to her. She and her father had saved for years so that she might attend school in America and emerge from her three years there as the master of photography she longed to be. To let all that go in order to have a baby had been inconceivable. She had not even contemplated it. Nor, however, had she contemplated how an abortion might ricochet against the walls of the rest of her life.

  It was with her now, daily. The memory of the harsh lights, the prick of the needle, the explanation of the scraping and suction that would follow, the residual bleeding, the attempt to forget. She had done so, very successfully, for years. But now the recollection dominated her every waking moment, for although she tried to tell herself that her continued, failed pregnancies had nothing whatsoever to do with that hastily terminated pregnancy of six years ago, she could not bring herself to believe that there was no connection. God sometimes stayed the hand of punishment, but it was only a stay. Retribution always fell upon the sinner in the end.

  That non-child would have had his fifth birthday sometime this next September. He would have been running about the house, raising a ruckus in the way of small boys. He would have played in the garden, teased the cat, pulled the dog’s ears. He would have scraped his knees and asked for stories to be read. He could have existed. He could have been hers.

  But beyond any concerns about her schooling and career, his birth would have meant the end of her relationship with Simon. And the mere knowledge of that short-lived pregnancy would crush her husband now. He had been able to accept everything else about her past, but he would not accept that. He could not do so.

  He stirred, raised himself on one elbow. He reached out to trace her eyebrows, her jaw. “Feeling better?” His words were gentle, his touch a source of unbearable pain.

  “Yes. Much.” The lie seemed inconsequential, set against the rest.

  “I missed you, my love.” His fingers touched her cheek, her shoulders, her throat. They brushed softly against her lips before he bent to kiss her.

  She would have drawn him to her. She would have parted her lips. She would have caressed and aroused him. She ached to do so.

  Tears stung her eyes. She turned her head away that he might not see them, but she wasn’t quick enough.

  “Deborah.” He sounded stricken.

  She shook her head wordlessly.

  “Oh God, it’s too soon. I’m sorry. Forgive me, Deborah. Please.” He touched her a last time before moving away from her, reaching for his crutches that leaned against the wall next to the bed. He swung himself to his feet and picked up his dressing gown, shrugging into it clumsily, hindered by his disability.

  Under different circumstances, she would have helped him put it on, but now such an act seemed to Deborah a declaration of devotion that he would surely find spurious. So she remained where she was and watched his halting progress towards the bathroom. His knuckles were white where he grasped the crutches. His face was a study in desolation.

  When the door closed behind him, Deborah began to weep, tears that provided the only sort of rain that had been sent to her roots for the last six weeks.

  Their days together had always possessed a sameness to them that Deborah had treasured. When she was not out completing a photographic assignment, she would be busy in her darkroo
m, readying a portfolio for presentation. Simon’s extensive forensic laboratory adjoined Deborah’s smaller workspace, sprawling through most of the upper floor of the house. When he was not in court or delivering a lecture or meeting with solicitors and their clients, he would be in the lab, as he was now. Just as she was in the darkroom with the door propped open, trying to summon up the interest to get to work on her month’s collection of photographs. The only difference from any other workday was the distance she had created between them and everything that was waiting to be said.

  The house was so hushed that the front doorbell sounded like splintering glass.

  “Who on earth…?” Deborah murmured. Then she heard the easy, familiar voice, followed by brisk footsteps on the stairs.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw Deb’s name come across that computer screen last night,” Lynley was saying to Deborah’s father. “What a homecoming that must have been.”

  “Upset the girl a bit,” was Cotter’s polite response.

  Hearing it, Deborah found herself grateful for once that her father habitually slipped into the role of servant whenever someone came to the house. Upset the girl a bit was sufficient information to answer a casual remark of Lynley’s. It hid reality while it served as reply.

  As he entered the lab with the role of servant pulled out of his repertoire, Cotter said, “Lord Asherton’s here to see you, Mr. St. James.”

  “To see Deb, more accurately, if she’s about this morning,” Lynley added.

  “She is,” Cotter replied.

  Deborah rued the fact that she had not shut herself in the darkroom with the warning light burning to indicate she was not to be disturbed. Seeing anyone at the moment for friendly conversation seemed an unendurable pretence to have to live through. Seeing Lynley and being exposed for even an instant to his intuitive ability to read moods was excruciatingly worse. But she could hardly escape. Her father had nodded in her direction before leaving them, and Lynley had already come far enough into the lab to see that the darkroom door stood open. Simon, she saw, was studying a set of fingerprints in a far corner of the lab.