Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley got to his feet. Havers did likewise, stowing her notebook back into her shoulder bag. At the study door, Lynley stopped.

  “Tell me, Headmaster. Did you know that John Corntel and Cowfrey Pitt had exchanged duty weekends?”

  “Yes. Have you a problem with that?”

  “Who else knew?”

  “Anyone. Everyone. It’s no secret. The name of the duty master is posted outside the dining hall and in the masters’ common room.”

  “I see. Thank you.”

  “What does that have to do with all this?”

  “Perhaps everything. Perhaps nothing.” Lynley nodded a farewell and, with Havers, left the room.

  They didn’t speak until they were out of the building, pausing on the drive next to Lynley’s car. Eight starlings swooped past them, cutting the afternoon air with the rush of their wings, alighting in the larger of the two beech trees that stood like sentinels upon either side of the lane that led off the school grounds. Lynley watched their flight.

  “What’s next?” Havers asked.

  Lynley roused himself from his observation of the birds. “Matthew Whateley’s real background. Whatever it is. We need to know it for a certainty before we go on.”

  “The bigotry angle, then,” she said, squinting up at the chapel roof. “D’you suppose that’s why Edward Hsu killed himself, sir?”

  “As provocation, racism is insidious enough, isn’t it? A boy alone, away from his family, caught in an environment that’s alien to him, one in which he’s not as comfortable as he would like to be.”

  “Sounds like Matthew Whateley, doesn’t it?”

  “It does, Sergeant. That’s what concerns me.”

  “You’re not thinking Matthew Whateley killed himself and all of this is some sort of elaborate hoax, made to look like a murder?”

  “I don’t know. We need the postmortem from Inspector Canerone in Slough. Even the preliminary results should tell us something, give us some sort of direction.”

  “Until then?” Havers asked.

  “We do our best. Let’s see what the Whateleys have to tell us about their son.”

  As usual, Harry Morant was the last boy to hang up his games clothes in the drying room of Calchus House. It was a habit of his. He always dawdled behind the others when games were over for the afternoon so that he wouldn’t have to crowd into the drying room with everyone else.

  It wasn’t the jostling of all the boys that bothered him. Rather, it was the overpowering smell of sweat and dirty clothes. This odour was intensified by the room’s saunalike temperature, the product of hot water pipes running horizontally along one wall of the small room. If Harry waited until the others had already made use of the drying room, he could draw a deep breath outside the door, fly inside to hang his clothes and towel over one of the pipes, and fly out again without ever having to breathe in the stench that he had once heard the matron fondly call “pure boy.” So he always took his time about washing, about changing his clothes, about wandering slowly to the southwest corner of the building where the drying room was tucked out of sight.

  He trudged in that direction now, his hockey kit and towel dangling limply in his hand. His feet felt heavy. His shoulders ached. In his chest was a hollow that seemed to grow larger with every passing hour. Something gnawed within him to create that hollow, and it seemed to Harry quite reasonable to conclude that the gnawing would continue until fear and grief and responsibility ate their way greedily right through his flesh, leaving only his bleeding corpse behind. He vaguely remembered reading about some American killer being sentenced to die in the electric chair and saying to the judge who had pronounced the sentence: “You can’t kill me. I’m dead already.” That’s how Harry was beginning to feel.

  At first it hadn’t been like that at all. Fear had kept him quiet then. For it hadn’t taken long for the word to filter down among the third formers that Matthew Whateley had been tortured before his death. Since Harry wasn’t a particularly brave boy, the terror of encountering a similar fate had been enough to ensure that he said nothing to anyone. But fear had soon been replaced by grief, engendered by the knowledge that he himself had played a major role in the drama of what had happened to his friend, engendered by the memory of Matthew’s determination to be of assistance in the nightmare that had become Harry’s life at Bredgar Chambers. Because of this knowledge, responsibility tore at him, devouring both his heart and his conscience. In combination with both dread and sorrow, it was enough to make Harry long only for an end to everything. So he found himself more and more feeling like that wild-eyed American killer, and there was a form of blessing to that. If he was already dead, nothing could harm him any longer.

  At the end of the corridor, he took in a deep breath, held it, and pushed open the drying room door. The heat from the water pipes rose like a wall before him. He edged into the room.

  It wasn’t too much larger than a cupboard, with stained plaster walls, a grey linoleum floor, and a ceiling largely taken up by a padlocked trap door upon which numerous wads of chewing gum had been fashioned into the letters f-u-c and the beginning of a k by a student who had climbed up the rusty metal wall ladder to reach it. One dim bulb above the door provided light, and in this meagre illumination Harry saw not only that little space was left on the water pipes for his own clothes, but that many of the other garments had been haphazardly thrown into the room in such a rush that they now lay in sweat-sodden piles upon the floor. Matron wouldn’t like that. Nor would their house prefect. It would be punishment for all if the room were not straightened up.

  Harry sighed, gagged in a breath of the foetid, hot air, and shuddered as he picked up the nearest pile of garments and began to hang them on the pipes to dry. They felt clammy in his hands, and an underlying stickiness clinging to them troubled his memory. It was as if once again, in this fractured moment, his fist was pressed against the sweat-drenched jersey covering the chest that held him pinned to the floor in the darkness.

  Want a grind, nancy boy, want a grind, want a grind?

  Harry cried out. He looked for escape, flinging clothing on the pipes as quickly as he could.

  Want a grind, nancy boy, want a grind, wantagrind?

  His grip tightened on the garment he held. There would be no rescue, not from this, not now. Whether he told or not, the outcome would be the same. It was inevitable. It was his due.

  His eyes dropped to his hands, which had begun to twist and wring a navy sock. Unlike the other clothes in the room, it was completely dry, and his fingers pulled upon it, making contact with a small patch of cotton that was sewn into the wool. Harry examined this. The number 4 had been written onto the cotton tag.

  He stared at it. It was hard to keep secrets at a place like Bredgar Chambers. He had heard this morning with everyone else that Matthew Whateley’s school clothes had been found in the rubbish pile by the porter’s lodge, partially burned. But not all his clothes, Harry saw now. Not everything had been there.

  He swallowed. His mouth was dry. Here was something. Something. It wasn’t sneaking, wasn’t telling, wasn’t even taking a risk. Not exactly. But it was something. Perhaps enough to fill the hollow in his chest. Perhaps enough to make the guilt and the sorrow go away.

  He looked at the open door furtively. The corridor was empty. Boys were doing their prep. He didn’t have much time before the house prefect would come looking for him, wondering why he wasn’t in the day room where he belonged. Sitting on the floor, Harry untied his shoe, stripped off his sock, and put Matthew’s on. It was a different shade from his own, so he put his own sock back on to cover it. His shoe was a bit snug as a result, but it didn’t matter. Matthew’s sock was safe.

  Now there was only deciding who to trust.

  15

  When Patsy Whateley answered the door and Lynley saw that she was still wearing her yellow dressing gown with its mass of dragons, he asked himself why he had not earlier connected the dressing gown with what the Bonnamys had sa
id about Matthew. The gown was obviously of a Chinese design, and seeing this seemed to give momentary credence, however unwarranted, to everything the Bonnamys had claimed.

  Patsy Whateley looked at them for some moments without apparent comprehension. In the late afternoon, light was failing quickly and since the cottage curtains were drawn and no lamps were on in the sitting room, she stood in deep shadow, her features obscure. She pushed the door wide open and placed herself squarely in the gap, arms flaccid at her sides. Her dressing gown gaped open to reveal part of one breast sagging from her chest like a half-empty flour sack. Her feet were bare.

  Sergeant Havers was the first to speak. She moved into the cottage as she did so. “Are you alone, Mrs. Whateley? What have you done with your slippers? Come, let me help you.”

  Lynley followed her inside and shut the door. That done, he became instantly and unavoidably aware of the foul, fishy odour that Patsy Whateley’s unwashed body was lending to the cottage air. While Sergeant Havers did her best to straighten the woman’s inadequate clothing, finding at least one of her slippers near the plaid chair, Lynley saw to the lights and cracked open one of the front windows to give at least some relief to the overpowering stench.

  Sergeant Havers was speaking to Patsy Whateley as she worked at retying the cord round the woman’s thick waist. “Isn’t there someone we can ring, Mrs. Whateley? Have you relatives nearby? Is your husband at work?”

  Patsy didn’t respond. Lynley observed her in the light, noting the crusty skin that surrounded her eyes, the lack of colour in her face, the large circular stains beneath her armpits. Her movements were sluggish. He went into the kitchen.

  It had not been cleaned or straightened since Patsy Whateley had baked her biscuits on the previous day. The biscuits lay scattered across the work tops, among the mixing bowls in which batter had hardened into irregular concretions. Utensils were everywhere—spoons, bowls, spatulas, cups, baking sheets, an electric mixer. They sat on the stove top, on the table, on the work top, and in the sink. This was partially filled with filmy water.

  Lynley found the kettle sitting lopsided on a burner and carried it to the sink. Sergeant Havers joined him.

  “I’ll do this, sir,” she said. “Perhaps I can find something for her to eat as well. I imagine she’s not had anything since Sunday morning.”

  “Where’s this woman’s husband?” Lynley heard himself demand. He felt Sergeant Havers’ eyes upon him.

  “We each deal with loss in a different way,” she responded.

  “But not alone,” he snapped. “There’s no need for her to be alone.”

  Havers turned off the tap. “We’re all alone, Inspector, when it comes down to it. With only a flaming illusion that we’re anything else.” She put the kettle on the stove and went to the refrigerator. “There’s a bit of cheese in here. Some tomatoes as well. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Lynley left her and returned to the sitting room where Patsy Whateley was slumped into the chair. Passing the electric fire, he saw the second of her slippers beneath it, and he took it to her, kneeling in front of her to slide it onto her unwashed foot. Holding her heel in his hand for a moment and feeling the hard, scabby surface of her skin, he was struck by unaccountable sorrow.

  As he rose, she spoke. She sounded hoarse, as if it was a struggle to speak at all. “Slough police won’t give me Mattie back. I rang them today. But they won’t let us have him. So we can’t even bury him.”

  Lynley sat on the sofa. The counterpane that had covered it previously lay in a heap on the floor. “You’ll have Matthew back as soon as the autopsy is completed,” he told her. “If the police get a backlog of work, it can take a few days. They run some lengthy tests.”

  Patsy plucked at the sleeve of her dressing gown. A crescent splatter of biscuit batter had dried to the material. “No point to that, is there? Mattie’s dead. Nothing else matters.”

  “Mrs. Whateley.” Lynley had never felt so useless. Fruitlessly he sought words of comfort, but he found nothing save a single piece of information that might give her some insubstantial relief. “You were right about Matthew.”

  “Right?” She licked at dry, chapped lips.

  “We found his school clothes this morning. We’re fairly certain his death occurred at Bredgar Chambers. You were right. He didn’t run away.”

  The information seemed to give the woman a small degree of solace, for she nodded, and looked towards the boy’s picture on the sideboard in the dining area. “Mattie wasn’t a runner. Knew that from the first, didn’t I? He wasn’t brought up to run away if things were a trouble to him. Faced things head-on, did Matt. But I don’t see why anybody would want to kill my boy.”

  It was this question that they had come to Hammersmith to address. Lynley sought a way to lead into it. His eyes passed over the room, coming to rest on the shelf beneath the front windows on which stood the souvenir cups and the marble sculptures. Nautilus, he saw, had been removed, but Mother and Child stood next to a nude woman who lay in an oddly contorted position with her back arched and her breasts pointed towards the sky. The mother and child, he saw, were linked together in stone by the curve of the mother’s arm, an eternal conjunction, unbreakable and infinite. It was the metaphor he needed. His eyes on the sculpture, he asked the question.

  “Have you any brothers and sisters, Mrs. Whateley?”

  “Four brothers. A sister.”

  “Do any of your brothers have difficulty with colours as Matthew did?”

  She looked perplexed. “No. Why?”

  Sergeant Havers returned to them from the kitchen. She carried a tray on which she had assembled two cheese and tomato sandwiches, a cup of tea, three ginger biscuits. She set this in front of Patsy Whateley and urged a quarter of a sandwich into her hand. Lynley waited until Patsy had begun to eat before he went on.

  “The inability to tell the difference between colours is a sex-linked characteristic,” he explained. “Mothers pass it on to their sons. In order for Matthew to be colour deficient, he would have had to inherit that tendency from you, his mother.”

  “Mattie knew his colours,” she said in weak protest. “Just a few he had trouble with.”

  “Blue and yellow,” Lynley acknowledged. “The school colours at Bredgar Chambers.” He guided her back to the central point. “You see, for you to be a carrier of a sex-linked characteristic—in this case, the inability to tell blue from yellow—your mother would have to be a carrier as well. That being the case, it would be unlikely that all four of your brothers would have escaped being affected, because it’s a genetic mutation, something that gets passed along in the chromosomes when a child is conceived.”

  “What’s this to do with Mattie’s death?”

  “It has more to do with his life than his death,” Lynley said gently. “It suggests that Matthew wasn’t your natural son.”

  Her hand still held the sandwich, but she dropped her arm to her lap. Part of a tomato slipped out and streaked red against the yellow of her dressing gown. “He didn’t know. Mattie didn’t know.” She got up abruptly, letting the sandwich fall to the floor. She went for Matthew’s photograph and brought it back to her chair. As she spoke, she gazed upon it, clutching the frame. “Our boy, was Mattie. Our real boy. It never made a bit of difference to us that he was born to someone else. Not a bit of difference. Never. He was ours from the time he was six months old. Such a good baby. Such a love, was Mattie.”

  “What do you know about his background? About his natural parents?”

  “Little enough. Only that one of his parents was Chinese. But that made no difference to me or to Kev. He was our boy, was Mattie. Right from the start.”

  “You’d been able to have no children of your own?”

  “Kev can’t have children. We tried for years. I wanted to have that artificial thing, but Kev said no, said he wouldn’t have me carrying another man’s child, no matter how it was managed. We tried to adopt. Years and years. But no one would let us.�
� She looked up, leaving the picture at rest in her lap. “Kev had trouble finding work that would last in those days, and even if he had, adoption folks didn’t find a barmaid suited to be a mum.”

  Lynley saw how the puzzle was being completed and asked his next question, even though it was mere formality, even though he knew in advance what the answer would be. Circumstances had been conspiring to prepare him to hear it in a hundred different ways over the last two days. “How did you come to adopt Matthew?”

  “Mr. Byrne—Giles Byrne—arranged it.”

  Patsy Whateley delineated the history of their relationship with Giles Byrne: how he had come into the Blue Dove regularly from his home a short distance away on Rivercourt Road; how he had come to know the barmaid through their nightly chats; how he seemed willing to listen to Patsy’s tales of being rejected by adoption agencies; how he told her one night that a child was available if she didn’t object to the fact that he was mixed race.

  “We went to a solicitor’s office in Lincoln’s Inn. The baby was there. Mr. Byrne’d brought him. We signed the papers and brought Mattie home.”

  “That was all?” Lynley asked. “There was no exchange of money?”

  Patsy Whateley looked horrified. “Did we buy our boy, you mean? No! We did nothing more than sign papers, we did. And then sign a few more when the adoption was final. Mattie was our real son right from the beginning. We never treated him otherwise.”

  “Did he know about his racial background?”

  “Never. He never knew he was adopted. He was our real boy. Our real boy, Inspector.”

  “So you don’t know who his natural parents are?”

  “Didn’t need to know, Kev and I. We didn’t care to know, did we? Mr. Byrne just said he knew of a baby we could have. That’s all that mattered. All we had to do was promise that we’d bring the boy up so as to allow him to have a better life than just Hammersmith. That was what Mr. Byrne asked us to do. That’s all.”