Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

“A better life than Hammersmith? What exactly did Mr. Byrne mean by that?”

  “The school, Inspector. In order to keep him, we had to promise to send Mattie to Bredgar Chambers, Mr. Byrne’s old school.”

  “Maybe Giles Byrne’s penchant for things Chinese extended to females,” Sergeant Havers noted as they turned the corner from the Upper Mall onto Rivercourt Road. “We know he was fond of Edward Hsu. Why not fond of some female Chinese as well? Extremely fond, if you know what I mean.”

  “I haven’t discounted the possibility that he’s Matthew’s natural father,” Lynley responded.

  “He won’t be admitting that to us in a friendly tête-à-tête, Inspector. Not if he’s managed to keep it quiet all these years. He’s a fairly well-known public figure, after all. That BBC talk show, the political commentaries, the newspaper column. It might look a bit black against him, mightn’t it, if an illegitimate son came to light? Especially a mixed race son that he abandoned. Especially if the mother was considerably younger than—perhaps ruined by—our Giles.”

  “We can’t be sure of anything, Havers, until we see what sort of link, if any, we’re forging between Matthew Whateley’s parentage and his murder.”

  The Byrne house was only a short distance from the Upper Mall and the river. It was a three-storeyed, brick Victorian structure, without architectural merit other than that found in its passion for symmetry. This passion expressed itself in a repetition of windows—two on each floor—in the balanced ornamentation upon the front of the building, and in the design of the front door upon which knocker, post slot, and knob all lined up one beneath the other with recessed panels on either side. The door, Lynley saw, had suffered damage recently, for the wood was freshly scarred in several places and its white paint was smeared with streaks of dirt.

  In the growing darkness, lights shone in the rooms at the front of the house, both on the ground floor and up above. When Lynley and Havers knocked on the door, it was opened within moments. They were not greeted by Giles Byrne, however, but rather by a beautiful Pakistani woman perhaps thirty years old. She wore a full-length ivory caftan of silk and a beaded necklace fashioned into a collar of gold. Combs held long, dark hair away from her face, and her gold earrings winked in the foyer light. She was obviously not a servant.

  “How may I help you?” Her voice was low-pitched, pleasant, like a musical instrument.

  Lynley produced his warrant card which she studied. “Is Mr. Byrne in?” he asked.

  “Indeed. Of course.” The woman stepped back from the door and motioned them to come inside. The gesture drew the sleeve of her caftan back along her smooth, dark skin. “If you’ll wait there in the sitting room, Inspector, I shall fetch him for you. Please do help yourselves to a drink.” She smiled. Her teeth were small, very white. “If you’re still on duty, I shan’t tell a soul. Do excuse me, if you will. Giles is working in the library.” She left them, running lightly up the stairs.

  “Not doing badly for himself in the love and companionship department, our Mr. Byrne,” Havers muttered when they were alone. “Or perhaps she’s someone he’s tutoring. Because he loves education. A real pedagogue, our Giles.”

  Lynley shot her a look and nodded her into the sitting room to the left of the front door. It faced Rivercourt Road, comfortably but not ostentatiously furnished with well-made pieces that would stand the test of time and use. The dominant colour was green, present in the pale washed lime of the walls, in the moss of the two sofas and the three chairs, in the rich summer leaf of the carpet whose thickness muffled their footsteps. Across the top of a walnut piano that stood near the window were displayed an assortment of photographs, and Lynley went to examine these as they waited for Giles Byrne to join them.

  The pictures acted as testament to the special gift that Byrne brought to his work as the host of one of the BBC’s political talk shows. In them, he posed with an array of governmental notables representative of every possible philosophical bent from Margaret Thatcher to Neil Kinnock; from an ageing Harold Macmillan to the Reverend Ian Paisley to a scowling Bernadette Devlin; from three successive American Secretaries of State to one former President. At the side of each of these, Byrne looked the same—sardonic, mildly amused, neither attached nor devoted to anyone. The fact that Byrne was able to keep his political philosophy hidden was what had made him such a success as an interviewer for the BBC. He attacked a problem or a personality from any angle, acting as no one’s advocate. He was a man whose acid wit and rapier tongue had torn apart many a cocksure political bigwig in his time.

  “Edward Hsu,” Sergeant Havers was saying meditatively.

  Lynley saw that she had gone to the fireplace above which hung two watercolours, both views of the Thames. They possessed that delicacy of brushwork and misty etherealisation of detail peculiar to Eastern painting. In one, trees, banks, and brakes rose out of a ground fog and seemed to float as effortlessly as the barge nearby on the water at dawn. In the other, three pastel-clad women took shelter from a sudden rainfall on the porch of a riverside cottage, their picnic left disregarded behind. Both paintings were signed simply E. Hsu.

  “Nice work, these,” Havers said. She picked up a small photograph that stood on the mantel beneath them. “This must be Edward Hsu, then. A bit less formal than that snap of him in the chapel at the school.” Her eyes moved round the room several times. She looked back down at the picture, frowning, saying slowly, “Inspector, there’s something odd here.”

  Lynley joined her, took the picture from her hands. In it, Edward Hsu and a very young Brian Byrne posed, smiling, in one of the boats on what appeared to be the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Brian sat between Edward’s legs, his little hands over Edward’s on the oars.

  “Odd?” Lynley asked.

  Havers replaced the photograph and walked to a cedar bureau across the room. On it stood a copy of the same picture of Matthew Whateley that they had seen in his parents’ cottage. Havers picked this up.

  “We have Edward Hsu’s picture. We have Matthew Whateley’s picture. We have”—she gestured towards the piano—“a good half a dozen toffs and assorted swells. But only that one picture of Brian Byrne, in the boat with Edward Hsu. And what was Brian—three years old then? Four?”

  “Nearly five.”

  The two words had come from the doorway. Giles Byrne stood watching them. In the foyer behind him, the Pakistani woman looked like a study of light and dark in her caftan.

  “It’s no secret that Brian and I are estranged,” Byrne commented as he entered the room. His footsteps were slow. He looked extremely worn out. “At his choice, not mine.” Momentarily, he gave his attention to his companion. “There’s no need for you to stay, Rhena. You’ve a brief to work on for court next week, haven’t you?”

  “I wish to stay, my dear,” she replied and moved across the room soundlessly to sit on the sofa. She slipped off a delicate pair of sandals and drew her legs up beneath her. Four thin gold bracelets slid down her arm. She directed her eyes towards Byrne and kept them upon him.

  “As you wish, then.” He went to a small coaching table on which stood decanters, glasses, and a bucket of ice. “A drink?” he asked Lynley and Havers over his shoulder. When they demurred, he took his time about pouring a straight whisky for himself and a mixture of several spirits for the woman. This done, he turned on the gas fire in the fireplace, adjusted the height of the flame, and carried both drinks to the sofa where he joined his companion.

  If all this were an effort to stall for time, to marshal his thoughts, to assemble defences, or to demonstrate that he would control the interview, it also gave Lynley ample opportunity to study the man. Byrne was, he knew, somewhere in his mid-fifties, a man without any distinguishing physical beauty at all. Instead, oddities dominated his appearance. Quirks made him seem a caricature of himself. He was nearly bald, with a thin fringe of hair that clung wispily to his crown and a tuft like a forelock drooping onto his brow. His nose was too large, his mouth and eyes were too s
mall, and, from forehead to chin, his face narrowed so dramatically that it resembled a perfect inverted triangle. He was quite tall and thin, and although his clothes appeared expensive—hand-loomed tweed, if Lynley wasn’t mistaken—they hung upon him loosely. His long arms dangled from his jacket, emphasising large, knobby-knuckled hands. These were jaundiced-looking, particularly the fingers which, on left and right hand both, bore the stains of nicotine.

  As Lynley and Havers sat, Byrne coughed catarrhally into a handkerchief before he lit a cigarette. Rhena reached for an ashtray on the table next to the sofa and held it in her right hand for him. She placed her left hand on his thigh.

  “You no doubt know we’ve come to speak to you about Matthew Whateley,” Lynley said to Byrne. “No matter where we’ve turned in the investigation so far, your name has come up as a recurring theme. We know Matthew was adopted, we know that you arranged the adoption, we know that Matthew was part Chinese. What we don’t know—”

  Byrne’s cough broke into Lynley’s words. He spoke abruptly once he had it controlled. “What does any of that have to do with the more salient fact that Matthew is dead? A child’s been brutally murdered. God knows what sort of paedophile’s on the loose. And you’re checking into the boy’s genealogy as if someone on his family tree might actually be responsible. I don’t see how that makes any sense.”

  Lynley had witnessed Byrne at work often enough to recognise the ploy. He would put the subject on the defensive and batter him with a barrage of comments to which he felt he must give competent answers. Yet Lynley knew if he tried to deal with any of the comments, Byrne would move skilfully forward like the verbal swordsman he was, slicing his responses to bits with challenges to their credibility and consistency.

  “I’ve absolutely no idea what it has to do with Matthew’s murder,” he said in reply. “That’s what I’ve come to discover. I admit that my curiosity was piqued yesterday when I learned that you were once close to a Chinese student who killed himself. Piqued even more when I learned that, fourteen years after that student’s death, you promoted another student—this one part Chinese—for a scholarship for which he was not the best qualified. And then that student ended up dead as well. Frankly, Mr. Byrne, in the past two days I’ve found myself running into far too many coincidences for all this not to be tied together in some fashion. Perhaps you’d like to address yourself to that.”

  Byrne took in this response from behind the smoke that curled upwards from his cigarette. “The facts of Matthew Whateley’s birth have nothing whatsoever to do with his death, Inspector. But I’ll tell them to you if that’s what you’re so intent upon discussing.” He paused to tap his cigarette against the ashtray. He drew in on it again before he went on. His voice was raspy. “I knew of Matthew Whateley because I knew—and loved—his father. Edward Hsu.” Byrne smiled as if reading a reaction on Lynley’s face. “No doubt you were thinking that I was the father, a man with a fatal proclivity for things Chinese. Sorry if the truth’s a disappointment to you. Matthew Whateley was no child of mine. I have only one son. You’ve met him.”

  “And Matthew’s mother?” Lynley asked.

  Byrne reached in his jacket pocket, brought out a packet of Dunhills, and lit a second cigarette from the glowing half-smoked stub of the first. This he crushed out in the ashtray, coughing viscously into his hand.

  “It was a particularly unsavoury situation, Inspector. Matthew’s mother wasn’t some attractive little dewy adolescent with whom Edward had become enamoured. Considering the boy’s single-minded devotion to his studies, a romantic entanglement with a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old girl was unlikely, to say the least. On the contrary, the mother was an older woman who seduced the boy. For the thrill of the conquest, I should guess, or the gratification of knowing she was still desirable, or the tremendous ego boost of having a younger man want to possess her. Choose which you will. I can only assume her motivation was one of them.”

  “You didn’t know the woman?”

  “I knew only what I managed to get Edward to tell me.”

  “What was that?”

  Byrne sipped his whisky. Next to him on the sofa, Rhena sat motionless. Some moments before, her eyes had dropped to her hand on his leg. She kept them there.

  “The barest facts. She invited him to tea several times. She professed an interest in his well-being. That’s how it began. It ended in the bedroom. I’m sure it was a lubricious kick for the woman to initiate such an innocent into the rites of passion. And what a feather in her cap to be found desirable by a teenager on the brink of manhood. I suppose the only thing she didn’t allow for was becoming pregnant by him. But once she was, she used her condition in a failed attempt to force Eddie to get money from his family. Extortion. Blackmail. Call it what you will.”

  “Is that why he killed himself?”

  “He killed himself because he believed the school would expel him if the truth were told. The rules about sexual licence are fairly explicit. But even if that weren’t the case, Eddie believed he’d dishonoured his family’s name. They’d sent him to be educated at considerable cost. Sacrifices had been made for him, and he had disgraced them.”

  “How do you know all this, Mr. Byrne?”

  “I’d tutored Eddie in written English since he was in the fourth form. He’d been here in my home nearly every holiday. I knew him. I was fond of him. I could see he was depressed in the last few months of his upper sixth year, and I didn’t let up until I had the story from him.”

  “He wouldn’t reveal the woman’s identity?”

  Byrne shook his head. “Eddie would have believed it was honourable to hold his tongue about that.”

  “I can’t think that he didn’t see—or wasn’t told—how much more dishonourable killing himself would be,” Lynley commented. “Especially in a situation that was not entirely of his own devising.”

  Byrne appeared completely unruffled, in spite of the accusation behind Lynley’s words. “I don’t intend to argue Eastern culture with you, Inspector. Or with anyone else. I’ll just give you the facts. This woman”—he gave bitter emphasis to the word—“could have had an abortion without Eddie’s ever being the wiser. But she wanted money, so she informed the boy that if he wasn’t able to tell his family the truth, she would tell them herself. Or she would talk to the Headmaster to make sure that Eddie did ‘his duty as a man.’ It was a threat that led either way to disgrace and dishonour.”

  “Surely even at Bredgar Chambers there were extenuating circumstances,” Lynley noted.

  “I explained them to him. I told him that it wasn’t all his fault, that he hadn’t raped this woman, that he had been seduced, that the Headmaster would take this into account. But Eddie couldn’t—he wouldn’t—see beyond what he had done to himself, to his family, to the school. He couldn’t study. He couldn’t work. Nothing I said made the least bit of difference. I think he’d decided to kill himself once he learned about the pregnancy in the first place. He was only waiting for the opportunity.”

  “He left no note?”

  “None.”

  “So only you know the truth.”

  “I knew what he told me. I didn’t pass the story on.”

  “Not even to the boy’s parents? You didn’t tell them that they were going to have a grandchild?”

  Byrne’s answer was weighted heavily by disgust. “Of course not. To tell them that would have made Eddie’s death even more senseless than it already was. He died to protect them from knowledge he believed would hurt them. Holding my own tongue respected his wish to protect them. It was the least I could do.”

  “But you did more than that, didn’t you? You went after the child. How did you find him?”

  Byrne handed his empty glass to Rhena, who placed it on the table. “The only piece of information he gave me about the woman was that she’d gone to Exeter to have the baby. I hired someone to track her down. It wasn’t difficult. Exeter isn’t that large, after all.”

  “And the wom
an?”

  “I never knew her name. I didn’t want to know it. Once I’d discovered that she’d left the baby behind for adoption, I didn’t care any longer what happened to the bitch.”

  “Was she someone from the school?”

  “From the school, from the village, from the area. That’s all I know. After Eddie’s death, all I cared about was somehow making sense out of the waste by seeing to it that his son at least had a decent life. I knew the Whateleys. I arranged for them to adopt the baby.”

  Still, there was a nagging problem—a snag in Byrne’s story—that couldn’t be ignored. “Surely there were many people ahead of the Whateleys hoping to adopt a child. How did you manage to pull strings to get past them?”

  “A mixed race child?” Byrne scoffed. “You must know that the line of people wanting mixed race children doesn’t exactly stretch to infinity.”

  “And even if it did at that time, I expect you exerted enough power to see to it that the Whateleys got the boy.”

  Byrne lit a third cigarette from the second. Rhena extinguished the second one for him, removing it from between his fingers and crushing it out in the ashtray.

  “I admit that. I don’t regret it. They’re good, hardworking people without pretensions.”

  “People willing to submit to your holding on to the reins of power in Matthew’s life?”

  “If that means allowing me to make crucial decisions about the boy’s education and his future, yes, they submitted. They wanted the best for him, after all. They were grateful enough to have him. So everyone won under the arrangement. I could keep my eye on Eddie’s son as he grew. The Whateleys finally had the child they longed for. Matthew was placed in a loving home, with a future that went beyond the boundaries of his family’s life. No one lost.”

  “Save Matthew. Save the Whateleys. In the end.”

  Byrne leaned forward in a quick, angry movement. “Do you think I feel nothing about this boy’s death?”

  “How much does your son Brian know about the circumstances of Matthew Whateley’s birth?”