Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  “It’s a thought. I’d hold fast to it if I were you, sir. Mark my words. Our Giles wasn’t telling us the truth. Not by half. And my money’s on the fact that little Rhena knew it. He could lie like the devil and get away with it. But she didn’t look at us once while he was talking. Did you notice that?”

  Lynley nodded, reaching for the door handle. “It was curious, wasn’t it?”

  “Then what do you think about having a go at looking into his story in Exeter? How many homes can there be that take pregnant women? Wouldn’t the birth be registered? We’d be fools to accept Byrne’s story at face value.”

  “We would,” Lynley agreed. He pushed open the car door. “Set Constable Nkata on it, Havers. In the meantime, let’s see if we’ve anything from the Slough police.”

  They dashed through the rain into the reception area of New Scotland Yard. There, two plainclothes receptionists were chatting with the uniformed constable who stood at the barrier that separated the public waiting area from the guarded world of policework. His hands draped over the metal sign upon which black letters demanded the presentation of warrant cards and office passes. As Lynley and Havers reached for their identification, one of the two receptionists spoke.

  “You’ve a visitor, Inspector. Been waiting since half-past four.” She nodded towards the wall on which was mounted the illuminated manuscript that celebrated on each page a distinguished piece of duty by a police officer.

  On one of the chrome and vinyl chairs beneath this memorial sat a schoolgirl, still in uniform, with a satchel pressed close to her side and held in place by her arm, as if in fear of its being snatched away. She was watching the eternal flame across the room.

  Lynley had heard of her, had seen her in the photograph in Matthew Whateley’s barn stall at Bredgar Chambers. But he had not been prepared for the fact that she looked far older than her thirteen years. Her skin was tawny, her eyes nearly black, her features perfectly sculptured on her face. Yvonnen Livesley, Lynley thought, Matthew’s old mate from Hammersmith.

  When he crossed the lobby to the girl and introduced himself, she scrutinised him openly. “Your identification,” she said. “If you will.” He produced it. She read it. Her large eyes moved from it to his face. Dozens of her beaded plaits clicked together as she stood, nodding in satisfaction. “I’ve something to give you, Inspector. From Matt.”

  In Lynley’s office, Yvonnen pulled a chair close to his desk. She pushed aside a stack of mail, putting her satchel in its place.

  “I didn’t hear about Matt until this morning,” she said. “One of the blokes at school had it from his mum who had it from her sister who knows Matt’s aunt. When I heard…” She fumbled momentarily with the satchel’s buckle. “I wanted to go home at once and fetch this, didn’t I, but the Headmistress wouldn’t let me. Even when I told her it was police business. She treated me like a joke.” She unfastened the buckle, pulled the satchel open, and placed a cassette tape on Lynley’s desk. “Here’s what you want, then. Here’s the flaming bastard what killed him.”

  That said, she sat and waited for Lynley’s reaction. Sergeant Havers closed the office door and took her place at the second chair.

  Lynley picked up the tape. “What is this?”

  Yvonnen nodded briskly, as if the question indicated he had passed a test of her private devising. She crossed one leg over the other and tossed back her hair. The beads jangled rhythmically. Reaching into the satchel a second time, she brought out a small tape recorder.

  “The tape came in the post just three weeks past,” she explained. “Matt sent a note as well, telling me to keep it in the safest place I could find. Told me not to tell anyone about it, not to say I had it, not to say I’d even heard from him at all. He said it was a duplicate of one he had at the school and he’d explain everything when he saw me. That was all. I listened to it once, but I didn’t…I didn’t understand, did I? Until what happened to Matt. Listen.”

  She took the tape from him and slid it into the recorder. A boy’s voice cried out—an indistinguishable word. It was followed by a grunt, a dull thud, and the hollow sound of thumping, as if a body had fallen against a bare floor and was being pounded repeatedly against it. A second cry was muffled. Then someone began to speak, a sinister whisper that was cold with a vicious perversity.

  “Want a grind, nancy boy? Want a grind? Want a grind? Oooh, what’s this nice little thing in our panties? Hmmm? Let’s have a better look…”

  Another cry. Another voice.

  “Leave off. Come on. Leave off. Let him be!”

  And then the first voice again, lower pitched in contrast to the second. “Oooh, you want some as well? Come here. Have a look.”

  A third voice, fractured, close to tears. “Please. No.”

  Then laughter. “You know you want it, nancy boy. You know how you do.” The sound of a blow. A cry muffled again.

  Lynley leaned forward, switched the tape off.

  “There’s more,” Yvonnen said in a rush. “It gets worse and worse. Don’t you want to hear it?”

  “How do you come to have this?” Lynley asked in response.

  Yvonnen ejected the tape and put it on the desk. “It gets worse,” she said again. “When I listened to it first, I didn’t understand. I thought…these boys, you see. They’re at this posh school. And things like this…” She stumbled wretchedly. For all the sophistication of her appearance and demeanour, she was indeed only thirteen years old.

  Lynley waited until she had regained her composure. “You’re not to blame, Yvonnen,” he told her. “No one could expect you to understand what any of this meant. Just tell me what you know, as far as you know it.”

  She raised her head. “Over the Christmas hols, Matt came round to see me. He asked me to show him how to wire a room for sound.”

  “That sounds an unusual request.”

  “Not from Matt to me. I play about with bugging devices. Matt knew that. I’ve been doing it for the last two years.”

  “Bugging devices?”

  “Like a hobby. I started out with just a tape recorder. In a soup tureen in the dining room. But now I use directional mikes. I like sounds. I want to do sound in films or for the telly. Like the bloke in Blow Out. Did you see that film?”

  “No.”

  “He did sound in films. That’s how I got interested. It was John Travolta,” she added ingenuously. “I’m dead good at it now. I wasn’t at first. The dining room sound from the soup tureen was all echoey, so I knew I couldn’t just hide a recorder. I needed something better. Something smaller.”

  “A bug.”

  “Just before Christmas I did my mum’s bedroom because I thought she might tell her boyfriend what presents I was getting. But the tape was dead boring. Just her moaning and groaning when her boyfriend did it to her and him saying things like ‘Oh, baby.’ I played it for Matt for a bit of a lark. And a tape of two masters talking at school. That one I did with a directional mike. From fifty yards. It was good.”

  “That gave Matthew the idea of wiring a room at the school?”

  She nodded. “All he would say was that he wanted to bug some room at the school and he wanted to know the best way to do it. He didn’t have any experience at it, but he was right earnest about getting it done. I thought he was doing it as a bit of a joke, so I told him the best thing would be to use a voice activated tape recorder. I loaned him this old one here. It came back in the post with the tape.”

  “Did he tell you whose room he was wiring?”

  “He didn’t tell me who. He just asked how to do it. I told him to hide the mike in a place where he wouldn’t get distortion from other noises, where he could still be sure he’d pick up the sounds he was interested in, where it wouldn’t be seen. I told him to check out the location in advance and run at least two rehearsals to make sure he got top quality sound. He asked one or two questions and took the recorder with him, but he never mentioned it after that. Then three weeks past, he sent me this tape.” />
  “Did he talk to you much about the school, Yvonnen? About his friends there? About how he was getting on?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Just that it was all right. Nothing else. Just all right. But…” She frowned, played disconsolately with the buckle of her satchel.

  “There’s something more?”

  “Only that…he always changed the subject if I asked him about the school. Like he didn’t want to talk about it, but he knew he would if I pressed him. I wish I had.”

  “Let’s see what kind of cobblers we’ve got. Come on. Let’s see. Oooh, little ones, aren’t they? Give ’em a squeeze. Will he cry now? What y’think? Will he cry?”

  “No! Stop! Please! I shan’t—”

  Lynley pressed the Off button as Sergeant Havers reentered his office. As before, she closed the door. But instead of sitting, she went to the window. Rain beat a sharp tattoo against the glass. She sipped from a disposable cup she was carrying. Lynley caught the fragrance of chicken soup.

  “Did you send her off safely?” he asked.

  “Constable Nkata’s driving her home.” Havers smiled wearily. “He took one look at her, saw the future in an instant, introduced himself, and volunteered for the duty.”

  “Transparent as usual.”

  “Nothing new in that.” Havers joined him at the desk, slumping onto one of the chairs. She meditated upon the yellow globules of liquid fat that dotted the surface of her soup. With a grimace, she drained the cup and tossed it in the rubbish. “It looks like we’ve come full circle.”

  Lynley rubbed his eyes. They felt strained, as if he had been trying to read without his spectacles. “Possibly,” he replied.

  “More than possibly,” she argued mildly. “We’ve got bullying on the tape. Just where we were yesterday morning, Inspector. You said that the third formers you spoke with seemed afraid, didn’t you? Now we know why. Someone was after Matt Whateley on a regular basis. For all the rest of the boys knew, they were next.”

  Lynley shook his head. He ejected the tape. “I don’t see it that way, Havers.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he told Yvonnen he wanted to wire someone else’s room for sound, not his own.”

  “The bully’s room, then.”

  “I’d agree with you, except there were other voices on the tape, not just the bully and his victim. The voices were young, third formers I should imagine.”

  “Then who—”

  “It has to be Harry Morant. Look how the pieces fit if we argue it’s Harry and not Matthew who was being bullied. Whoever did the bullying was breaking school rules, no doubt over a period of time. A school like Bredgar Chambers isn’t going to put up with this sort of abuse, so the bully faced certain expulsion if he was found out. Matthew knew about the bullying. Everyone knew. But they were all caught up in the code of behaviour that we spoke of before.”

  “Not sneaking on another student?”

  “Look how that affected Matthew. Kevin Whateley indicated that the boy had become more and more withdrawn during the last term. But Patsy said that there was never a mark on him, so it’s safe to say that no one was harming him. Add that to what Colonel Bonnamy told us about the conversation he and Matthew had concerning the school’s motto—‘Let honour be both staff and rod.’ Everything fits. That unwritten code of behaviour demanded that Matthew hold his tongue about the bullying of Harry Morant. But the school’s motto demanded that he take action to stop the bullying himself. That was the honourable thing to do. So he withdrew from his parents as he tried to decide how to uphold the school motto at the same time as he didn’t violate the unwritten code that was supposed to govern his behaviour among his peers. This tape represents his decision.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus. It cost him his life.”

  “It probably did.”

  Her eyes widened. “Then one of the pupils…Sir, all of them must know.”

  He nodded. His face was grim. “If this is the reason behind Matthew’s death, I think they’ve known from the first, Sergeant. All of them.”

  He reached for the stack of the day’s post that Yvonnen Livesley had pushed to one side of his desk. Absently he looked through it, finding the postcard midway through the stack.

  Like the other, it had come from Corfu, a photograph of the brilliant white buildings of the Monastery of Our Lady of Vlacherna set against the vibrant blue of the sea. The wooded height of Kanoni rose in the distance. Unlike the other, earlier postcard, however, the message on this one began with no salutation, as if by omitting his name, Helen was managing to do what she had set out to do: distance herself from him more and more every day.

  Two days of dreary rain! With the only entertainment being a prolonged visit to the museum at Garitsa. I know what you’re thinking. The lion of Menekrates is perfectly sweet, but after an hour of gazing upon him, one does long for something more animate as a diversion. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I’ve given myself wholeheartedly to relics and coins and bits of temple under glass. I shall be so cultured that you’ll hardly know me upon my return.

  H.

  Aware that Sergeant Havers’ eyes were on him, Lynley shoved the card into his jacket pocket, trying to keep his face indifferent, trying to refrain from rereading the last three words, trying to keep himself from hoping they meant that Helen would at last bring her Greek exile to an end.

  “So,” Havers said breezily with a nod at his jacket pocket, “nothing new on that score, I take it?”

  “Nothing new.”

  As he spoke, a sharp knock at the door heralded the entrance of Dorothea Harriman, secretary to Lynley’s divisional superintendent. She was dressed for her evening’s departure in typically Walesian fashion, wearing a tailored green suit, white blouse, a triple strand of cultured pearls, and a curiously shaped hat sprouting green and white feathers. Beneath it, her hair was cut to match the Princess’ latest style.

  “Thought I’d catch you still here,” she said, leafing through a stack of folders she cradled in one arm. “This lot was phoned in for you this afternoon, Detective Inspector Lynley. From”—her refusal to wear spectacles caused her to squint down at the scrawl across the front of the folder—“Detective Inspector Canerone. Slough police. Preliminary autopsy results on—” Again the squint. Lynley got to his feet.

  “Matthew Whateley,” he finished, extending his hand for the folder.

  “Is Deb home as well?” Lynley asked as he followed Cotter up the narrow stairway in the St. James house. It was nearly eight o’clock, an unusual time for St. James still to be working in his laboratory. To bury himself in forensic tasks into the night had long been his habit in the past, but Lynley knew he had given that up in the last three years that marked his engagement and his marriage to Deborah.

  Cotter shook his head. He paused on the stairs, and although most of his face was unreadable, he could not keep the concern from his eyes. “Been out most of the day. Some Cecil Beaton exhibit at the Victoria and Albert she wanted to see. Shopping as well.”

  It was a poor excuse. The Victoria and Albert Museum was long since closed for the day, and Lynley knew Deborah well enough to know how little she relished browsing through department stores. “Shopping?” he asked sceptically.

  “Hmm.” Cotter continued climbing.

  They found St. James bent over one of the comparison microscopes, making minute adjustments to the focus. A camera was attached to it, in preparation for documenting whatever two objects he was currently examining. Near the window—closed against the undulating pattern of the continuing rainfall—his computer was rhythmically spilling out sheets of paper upon which graphs and columns of numbers were printed.

  “Lord Asherton’s ’ere to see you, Mr. St. James,” Cotter said. “Will you be wanting coffee, brandy? The like?”

  St. James raised his head. Lynley saw with a jolt that his thin face was drawn, as if marked by sorrow and drained by fatigue. “
Nothing for me, Cotter,” he replied. “For you, Tommy?”

  Lynley declined and said nothing more until Cotter had left them alone together. Even then, finding a safe foundation upon which to construct a conversation with his friend was a delicate task. There was too much history between them, too many areas forbidden to discussion.

  Lynley drew out one of the stools from beneath the worktable and slid a manila folder next to the Zeiss microscope. St. James opened it, scanned the information scrawled on the documents inside.

  “These are the preliminary results?” he asked.

  “Such as they are. Toxicology shows nothing, St. James. And there’s no trauma at all to the body.”

  “The burns?”

  “Made by cigarettes, as we thought. But certainly not enough damage to kill him.”

  “It says here they’ve found fibres in the hair,” St. James noted. “What sort of fibres? Natural? Synthetic? Have you talked to Canerone?”

  “I spoke to him right after I read the report. All he could tell me at the time was that his forensic team were saying the fibres appeared to be a blend. Natural and synthetic. The natural one is wool. They’re still waiting for the test results on the other.”

  St. James gazed thoughtfully at the floor. “From your description I was thinking of the way hemp is treated when it’s turned into rope. But that obviously isn’t what they’re dealing with when they talk of natural and synthetic substances. Especially if they know one of them is wool.”

  “That was my first thought as well. But the boy was tied with cotton cording, not with rope. Probably heavy shoelaces, according to Canerone’s forensic team. And Matthew was double-gagged, St. James. There were fibres of wool in his mouth.”

  “A sock.”

  “Perhaps. That was tied in place with a cotton handkerchief. There were trace deposits of cotton on his face.”

  St. James went back to the previous information. “What are they making of these fibres in his hair, then?”

  “A number of hypotheses. Possibly from something he was laid against. Material from the carpet on the floor of a car, an old jacket in the boot, a blanket, a tarpaulin. Virtually anything that’s made of or covered by material. They’ve gone back to St. Giles’ Church to take samples inside, on the off chance that the body was kept there prior to being dumped in the field.”