Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  Deborah thought over the question. There did seem to be something after all….

  She went to the desk and found her copy of the rough manuscript of the book that her photographs were intended to illustrate.

  “Just a moment…I remember…” She brought the manuscript back, sat down, and began leafing through it to find Thomas Gray’s poem. Having done so, she skimmed the stanzas, exclaimed, and handed the manuscript to Lynley. “Look at the epitaph,” she said. “The first part.”

  He read the first four lines aloud.

  “Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth.

  A youth to fortune and to fame unknown;

  Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,

  And Melancholy marked him for her own.”

  Lynley looked up at Deborah. “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “I’m not even sure I want to believe it.”

  “How well do the lines fit that little boy?”

  “Perfectly.” Lynley removed his spectacles, stared at the fire. “Line by line, it’s all there, Deb. Matthew’s head was on the earth when you found him, wasn’t it? He certainly had neither fame nor fortune. His birth was humble—more than humble, I dare say. In recent months, he’d become morose, melancholy. His father described it like being in a trance. Noncommunicative.”

  Deborah felt a shiver of apprehension. “Then Stoke Poges was chosen deliberately.”

  “By someone who had a vehicle, someone Matthew knew, someone with a perverted interest in little boys, someone who knew the poem well.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “I don’t think I want to.” He pushed himself off the ottoman, paced the distance to the window and back. And again to the window. He rested his hand on the sill and looked out into the street.

  “What happens next?” Deborah asked him.

  “The autopsy has got to give us more. Fibres, hairs, deposits of some kind to explain where Matthew was from Friday afternoon until Sunday. He wasn’t killed in that field. He was dropped in that field. So for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more, he was a prisoner somewhere. The autopsy may give us an idea where. And a sure cause of death. Once we have that, we’ll have a clearer direction.”

  “But don’t you have a direction now? Because from what you were saying—”

  “It’s not clear enough! I can’t make an arrest on the strength of a poem, ownership of a car, position of trust at the school, and the curious manner of describing a little boy to me. Not to mention being head of English, a literature master into the bargain.”

  “So you do know,” Deborah said. “Tommy, is it someone you…?” She saw the answer on his face. “How dreadful for you. How perfectly awful.”

  “I don’t know. That’s just it. He has no clear motive.”

  “Except the curious manner of describing a little boy?” She reached for her photographs and chose her words with care. “He’d been tied up. I could see that. There were abrasions, places where the skin was raw and chafed. And the burns…Tommy, it’s the worst sort of motive. What’s making you afraid to face it?”

  He swung round from the window. “What’s making you afraid?” he demanded.

  The words buffeted the brittle calm that their few minutes of conversation had allowed her to develop. She felt her skin blanch.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Deborah, for God’s sake, do you think I’m blind?”

  She shook her head. Of course he wasn’t blind. He saw far too much. That had always been at the root of the problem. He persisted.

  “I saw how the two of you were acting this morning. You were like strangers. Worse than strangers.”

  Still she said nothing. She willed him to stop speaking. But he went on.

  “You’re removing Simon from the grief, aren’t you, Deb? You believe he feels no loss or at least that it doesn’t compare to yours. So you’re cutting him off. You’re cutting everyone off. You want to suffer alone, don’t you? As if it’s your fault. As if you’re being punished.”

  She felt her face betray her and knew she had to divert the conversation. She sought direction in vain.

  Somewhere in the house, the dog began barking, excited yelping that generally meant a demand for reward for some trick performed. She heard her father’s answering laughter.

  Lynley left the window and went to the wall of her photographs across the room. Deborah saw him looking at a small black and white study, one of her earliest efforts, taken shortly after her fourteenth birthday. In it, Simon lay in the garden on a chaise, covered by a wool blanket, his crutches at his side. His head canted to the left, and although his eyes were closed, his face was a revealing study of despair.

  “Did you never wonder why he leaves this hanging here?” Lynley asked. “He could remove it, you know. He could insist you replace it with something else, something more uplifting, something soothing.”

  “Something false.”

  “But he won’t do that, will he? Have you ever wondered why?”

  She saw it. She knew it. It lay at the centre of what she loved about her husband. Not physical strength, not spiritual virtue, not unyielding and implacable rectitude, but a willingness to accept, an ability to continue, a determination to struggle on. Those qualities in him spoke to her eloquently from the backward infinity of their lives together.

  What irony, she thought, that it should have turned out like this. With both of us damaged. But in Simon’s case, he’d had no control of the car or the accident itself. While she had had perfect control. She had made the decision to maim herself, because it had seemed easier at the time, because she had sought convenience in her life.

  “I’m crippled,” she said simply.

  Lynley recoiled from the word and the implications it had always held in his life. “That’s nonsense, Deb. You don’t know that. You can’t.”

  But she did.

  When he arrived home, Lynley found the day’s post where it usually was, on the upper left comer of his desk in the library, weighted down by an oversized magnifying glass that Helen had given him as a joke some years ago when he’d received his promotion to detective inspector.

  “The game’s afoot, my dear Lynley,” she had announced, plopping a large gaily wrapped package onto his desk. The magnifying glass had been inside it, along with a meerschaum pipe and a deerstalker.

  He had laughed to see them, to see her as well. That was always his reaction to being in her presence.

  He’d gone a long time without giving actual definition to what he was and what he felt when he was with Helen Clyde. There had seemed no need to admit to the obvious. With her, he was simply the best he could be—witty, articulate, intelligent, alive. She had somehow managed to engender within him all that was good. If he knew tenderness, it was owing to her willingness to reach out to him when he felt dejection. If he knew compassion, it was because she had shown him how deep was the well of her own sweet kindness. If he knew honesty, it was because she refused to accept anything less, from him or from herself. If he stood complete, coming to terms with his past and willing to face the future, Helen had given him the strength to do so.

  What she had not given him was patience. What she had not given him was her ability to live a single day at a time, allowing life’s possibilities to grow and develop. He wanted her—now, today, tonight—in every way conceivable, in a consuming possession of her body and her spirit. He ached to have her, and two months’ separation had done nothing to mitigate the intensity of that desire.

  The expense of spirit in a waste of shame…. But lust was not the cornerstone of what he felt for Helen. It never had been.

  Lynley picked up the post and walked to the rosewood table where he kept his decanters. He poured a whisky and flipped through the envelopes, looking, as he had been doing for the past two months even without thinking, for one bearing an odd, Greek postmark. It was not there. In its place were bills, circulars, theatre advertisements, a letter from his solicitors, another from his mother, a third fro
m his bank.

  Returning to his desk, he slit open his mother’s letter and read through the light chitchat that comprised her loving attempt to urge him away from loneliness. Two of the mares were about to foal; three calves had arrived far earlier than expected but the vet had seen to them and all was well; the Pendykes were sinking a new well on their farm; his brother Peter was recovering from flu; Aunt Augusta had visited for an unendurable three days. And how are you, Tommy darling? We’ve seen so little of you since January. Why not spend a weekend here? Bring a friend….

  Someone moved along the corridor outside the library, humming a spirited rendition of one of the more popular tunes from Les Misérables. Denton, Lynley thought. His valet was a great fan of London theatre. The door opened, brushing softly against the deep pile of the carpet. The humming swelled dramatically, then choked to a stop altogether as Denton entered the room and saw Lynley at his desk.

  “Sorry,” Denton said with an abashed grin. “Didn’t know you were home.”

  “Not planning to leave me for the stage, are you, Denton?”

  The young man laughed and brushed at his coat sleeve. “Not a chance of that. Have you had your dinner?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Denton shook his head. “Quarter to ten, my lord, and you’ve not had your dinner?”

  “I got caught up in things. Forgot all about it.”

  Denton didn’t look convinced. His eyes fell upon the post. Since he had been the one to bring it up to the library, there was no doubt that he knew what letters it contained, and what it did not. He said nothing, however, other than to enquire if his lordship wanted an omelette or soup or some fresh ham salad.

  “An omelette would be fine, Denton. Thank you,” Lynley replied. He wasn’t hungry, but picking round a plate of eggs would at least maintain a semblance of normality.

  Denton looked pleased. He began to exit and then apparently remembered why he had come into the room in the first place. He removed a folded paper from his pocket.

  “I was going to leave this on your desk. You had a call from the Yard just after nine this evening.”

  “What sort of call?”

  “A message someone took for you but thought best to pass on before tomorrow. The porter from Bredgar Chambers was trying to reach you. A bloke called Frank Orten. Seems he went out to the rubbish fire on the campus and found a school uniform there. A blazer, trousers, shirt, tie. Even shoes. The whole lot. He thought you might want to come round and have a look at them. He says he’s certain they’re the dead boy’s clothes.”

  11

  Frank Orten lived in an asymmetrically shaped lodge just inside the gates of the school. A broad bay window—shaded by a plane tree—projected towards the school drive, one pane open to the morning air. From this issued the steady wailing of a child. It was the first sound Lynley and Havers heard as they got out of the car and approached the lodge entry.

  As if he had been watching for them, Orten opened the door before they had a chance to ring the bell. He was already dressed for his workday, in a quasimilitary uniform designed to incorporate the colours of the school. His bearing was ramrod stiff, and his eyes snapped over them in an evaluative examination. “Inspector. Sergeant.” He nodded sharply, approval given, and jerked his head in the direction of a disarranged sitting room to his left. “Come in.”

  Without waiting for a response, he led the way, and planted himself before a stark stone fireplace above which hung a mirror framed in flaking gilt and spotted with age. The back of Orten’s head was reflected in it, as were the brass sconces at the other side of the room that cast oblongs of light up against the walls but did little else to dispel a gloom created by the room’s northern exposure and its single narrow casement window.

  “Bit of a mix this morning.” Orten indicated with a flick of his thumb the sound of continued weeping which came from behind a partially closed door to the right of the entry. “My daughter’s kids are with me for a few days.” A woman’s soothing voice attempted to smooth over the troubled waters, but the child’s wailing rose to hysterical heights, countered by the high-pitched shriek of another child’s angry accusation. Orten said, “A moment please,” and left them to join whatever fray was in progress. “Elaine, can you get his—” The door closed behind him.

  “Domestic bliss,” Havers commented, sauntering over to examine three excessively verdant plants on a carved chest beneath the window. She fingered a leaf experimentally. “Plastic,” she announced and wiped the dirt from her fingers.

  “Hmm.” Lynley was evaluating the room. The furniture consisted of a heavy sofa and two chairs upholstered in a colour that compromised between brown and grey, several tables holding lamps whose shades were askew, and wall decorations of a military nature. These hung above the sofa—two maps and a commendation—but their frames were dusty, and a cobweb dangled from one of them. Children’s toys were scattered across the floor, as were copies of Country Life with pages looking crumpled and sticky, as if the magazines had been used as mats beneath food. Everything about the room served as a suggestion that no woman shared Frank Orten’s life at the lodge.

  Nonetheless, when Orten returned to the sitting room, a middle-aged woman followed him. The porter introduced her as Miss Elaine Roly—he was careful to emphasise the Miss—and added the information that she was matron of Erebus House, as if this would logically explain her presence in his lodge at this hour of the morning.

  “Frank’s not much good with the grandchildren alone,” Elaine Roly clarified, rubbing her hands down the front of her dress as if in a quest for wrinkles. “Shall I be off, Frank? They seem to be settled now. You can send them up to Erebus after a bit, if you like.”

  “Stay.” Orten appeared to be accustomed to speaking in monosyllabic commands, accustomed to being obeyed as well.

  Elaine Roly complied cheerfully enough, choosing to sit next to the window, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the milky light striking the chair spotlit her in an unattractive fashion. She was at the same time austere and monochromatic, Quakerish-looking, like a creation from the mind of Charlotte Brontë. She wore a plain grey dress with a wide lace collar. Her shoes were black, crepe-soled, and sensible. Small stud earrings comprised her only jewellery, and her greying brown hair was pulled back from her face and pinned at the nape of her neck in the fashion of another century. Her nose, however, was shapely and pert, and the smile she directed at Lynley and Havers was genuinely warm.

  “Have you had coffee this morning?” she asked them, turning in her seat. “Frank, shall I—”

  “No need,” Orten replied.

  He picked at the braid on the lapel of his uniform jacket. It was, Lynley saw, frayed at that spot, as if Orten reached for it often.

  “The message I received last night indicated that you’ve found some clothes,” Lynley said to him. “Are they here in the lodge?”

  Orten wasn’t prepared to comply with such a direct approach. “Seventeen years, Inspector.” His tone suggested this was a prefatorial statement. Lynley saw Sergeant Havers’ impatient movement of the shoulders, but she went to the sofa where she opened her notebook and thumbed through the pages, making rather more noise than the effort required. Orten went on. “Seventeen years I’ve portered here. Nothing like this. No disappearance. No murder. Nothing. Bredgar Chambers has been fine. The best. No doubt of it.”

  “Other students have died, however. The chapel bears witness to that.”

  “Died, yes. But murdered? Never. Bodes ill, Inspector.” He paused to harumph and then concluded meaningfully with, “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  Lynley chose not to explore the innuendo. “Yet the suicide of a student must bode ill as well.”

  Orten’s hand went to the school ensign embroidered in yellow upon his breast pocket. His fingers reached for and plucked at the crown that floated above the sprig of hawthorn. A single gold thread was unravelling from it, beginning to destroy the entire design.

  “Suici
de?” he asked. “You’re saying Matt Whateley’s a suicide?”

  “Not at all. I was speaking of another student. If you’ve been here seventeen years, you must have known him. Edward Hsu.”

  Orten and Elaine Roly looked at one another. Lynley couldn’t tell if their reaction implied surprise or consternation.

  “You must have known Edward Hsu. You, Miss Roly? Did you know him? Have you been here long enough?”

  Elaine Roly’s tongue darted out to wet her lips. “Twenty-four years this month, sir. I began as a kitchen skivvy. Waited on the masters in the common room, I did. Worked my way up. I’ve been matron of Erebus the last eighteen years. And proud to say it.”

  “Was Edward Hsu an Erebus boy?”

  “He was. Edward was Erebus.”

  “A favourite of Giles Byrne, I understand.”

  “Mr. Byrne tutored Edward during the half-terms and holidays. He’s done that for years. He always picks a boy from Erebus to help out special. He’s an old boy from Erebus himself, and he likes to do something for the house when and where he can. A fine man, Mr. Byrne.”

  “Quite close to Edward Hsu, from what Brian Byrne tells me.”

  “Brian would remember Edward, I imagine.”

  “You must work closely with Brian since he’s house prefect of Erebus.”

  “Closely?” Her response was studied. “No. Not what I would call closely.”

  “But since he’s house prefect and you’re matron there—”

  “Brian’s a bit difficult,” she interposed. “A bit hard to read. A bit too caught up in…” She hesitated delicately. In the next room, the children began another fracas, this one milder than the last, but possessing the promise of escalation. “House prefects need to stand on their own two feet, Inspector,” Elaine Roly said.