Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  “This could be Lockwood’s worst nightmare come true,” Havers murmured. Ash fell from her cigarette onto one of the pictures. She brushed it off.

  Lynley couldn’t disagree. The pictures were all of nude children and adults, in both cases male, in all cases the child a subject of sexual bondage, under the power of the adult. This power was expressed through the use of weapons as props: a gun to the temple of a child in one picture, a knife pressed to the testicles in a second, a rope binding a blindfolded child in a third, a threatening live wire shooting sparks in a fourth. In all cases, the children performed upon grinning, aroused adults as if forced to do so, like little slave boys in a world of perverted sexual fantasy.

  “It verifies Colonel Bonnamy’s contention,” Havers continued.

  “It does that, doesn’t it?” Lynley asked. For beyond the egregious attractions of paedophilia implied by the photographs, beyond the prurient interest in homosexuality they revealed, there remained the fact that every picture was biracial, as if each one represented a twisted commentary on the problems inherent to miscegenation. Whites mixed with Indians, blacks with whites, Orientals with blacks, whites with Orientals. Reminded of Colonel Bonnamy’s contention about the racist connotation behind Matthew Whateley’s death, Lynley knew it was impossible to avoid the connection between the boy’s murder and the photographs before them.

  Havers drew in on her cigarette and paced to the window overlooking the cloisters and quad. “It looks bad. It does look awful. But if you think about it, sir, there’s something too convenient in Clive Pritchard having those snaps in his room. Just as if he was waiting for us to come along and question him so he could put them on the table and divert suspicion away from himself.” She examined the end of her cigarette, her eyes narrowed in speculation. “Because without those snaps, things look pretty bad for our boy, don’t they? He had easy access to an off-games chit—”

  “As had everyone else, apparently, if it comes to that, Havers.”

  “—which he used so no one would miss Matthew Whateley when he nabbed him. He had access to that chamber above the drying room and seeing as it’s in his own house, I’d say that makes it even more likely that he’s our man. He had a motive as well. No matter his fancy couldn’t-care-less talk about being booted out of Bredgar Chambers, you can’t tell me that doesn’t cause him some trouble at home.”

  “I see all that, Sergeant. But I also see what’s before us on the table at the moment. Like it or not, we can’t ignore either the subject matter of these pictures or the obvious possibility of a connection between them and Matthew Whateley’s death.”

  Havers rejoined him, stubbed out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray in the centre of the table. She sighed, not with reluctant submission to the implicit order from a superior officer but rather with an acceptance of an unpleasantness to come. “Time for a visit with Emilia, I take it?”

  “Quite.”

  They found the chemistry mistress alone in her laboratory on the ground floor of the science building. Her back to them as she worked at the glass and mahogany fume cupboard, Emilia Bond looked shrouded beneath her long academic gown, like a child playing dress-up in Renaissance garb. She peered over her shoulder as Lynley and Havers entered the room and closed the door behind them. The movement of her head ruffled her baby-fine hair like feathers.

  “Setting up for a bit of fun,” she explained and went on with her work, giving it her full attention.

  They joined her. The front glass panel of the cupboard—built like a window—was pulled down nearly all the way, leaving room only for her hands to work deftly beneath it. Upon the cracked, white interior tiles stood a beaker of liquid into which she was adding a solid substance. She stirred the mixture with a clear glass rod and watched as a second, new solid began forming.

  “Ammonium hydroxide and iodine,” she announced, as if they had come to evaluate her performance. “They form ammonium tri-iodide.”

  “That’s the bit of fun?” Lynley asked.

  “Pupils invariably love it. It appeals to the prankster in all of them.”

  “And the danger involved? What does that appeal to?”

  “Danger?” Her forehead creased with confusion.

  “You’re working inside the fume cupboard,” Lynley pointed out. “I’m assuming your chemicals release some sort of gas.”

  She laughed. “Oh! No, there’s no danger involved. Just a lot of mess if one isn’t careful. Look. I’ve made one batch already.” From a corner of the cupboard, she pulled forward a petrie dish that contained a small pyramid of yellow powder. She tapped a bit of this onto one of the tiles and pressed it with another glass rod. In answer, the powder popped and splattered up against the glass sides of the cupboard. Some of it landed like bright freckles on Emilia’s arms. “It’s mostly used for pranks,” she admitted with a grin. “Occasionally I like to show my fifth formers a bit of chemical fun. It keeps their attention. Frankly, I’ll do anything for their attention, Inspector.”

  She withdrew her hands from the cupboard, closed it, wiped the yellow speckles from her arms with a bit of rag from her pocket, and pushed down the sleeves of her academic gown. “I understand you’ve found Matthew Whateley’s sock.” She sounded businesslike. “Does that bring you any closer to the truth?”

  In reply, Lynley handed her a manila envelope into which he had placed the photographs. “Perhaps,” he replied.

  She took the envelope from him, opened it, and removed its contents. She said only, “I should hope—” before, with the photographs in her hand, she walked to one of the work stations and sat on the tall stool in front of it. Her face worked as she looked through the first three photographs on the stack. Her eyes darted from the pictures themselves to her hands which held them. Lynley saw this, his heart growing heavy. At least in this matter, it seemed that Clive Pritchard had been telling the truth.

  “My God, how horrible,” Emilia murmured. She placed the stack face down, and looked up at Lynley. “Wherever did you get these? What have they to do with—”

  “One of the students gave them to me, Miss Bond. He saw you dumping them onto the rubbish fire near the porter’s lodge late Saturday night.”

  Emilia pushed the photographs away from her. “I see. Well. You’ve found me out.” She sounded like a child trying hard to be clever. “They’re awful, aren’t they, but they seemed harmless enough, and I simply wanted to get rid of them without anyone being the wiser. I took them from one of my students, a boy in the lower sixth, as a matter of fact.” She hooked her feet round the legs of the stool as if to keep herself anchored upon it. “I should have reported him. I realise that. But we had a good talk—a terribly thorough talk—and he was awfully embarrassed. In the end, I promised I’d get rid of them. I had no idea—”

  “You don’t lie well, Miss Bond,” Lynley interrupted. “Some people do. To your credit, you’re not one of them.”

  “Lie?”

  “Your face is flushed. You’ve begun to perspire. I imagine your pulse is racing like the devil as well. Why don’t you tell us the truth?”

  “I am.”

  “You should have reported him. You had a good talk. He was awfully embarrassed. You promised to get rid of the pictures. That much was true, I dare say. But something tells me you wouldn’t be out at the rubbish pile in the middle of the night for a student, Miss Bond. For a colleague—perhaps for a lover—”

  She flinched. “All this has nothing to do with Matthew Whateley. Nothing. I know it. I swear it.”

  “You may be right,” Lynley replied. “But until I hear the truth, I’ve no way of concluding that.”

  “He didn’t…He couldn’t…”

  “John Corntel?”

  She raised her hands, clasping them together in an attitude of supplication, before she dropped them to her lap.

  “He told me that you were with him Friday night, Miss Bond. Part of Saturday as well. He said that you and he had begun to make love, but that things hadn’t wo
rked out.”

  Colour deepened on her face. “Did he?” She ran one hand along the edge of the work station, pressing into the wood. The skin beneath her nails whitened starkly.

  “I think his word was disastrous,” Lynley added.

  “No. It wasn’t. Not at first.”

  Her gaze went to the window. Outside, clouds had begun to obscure the day’s fresh sunlight. The remaining light was grey. Across the path, the rose window of the chapel looked dull, its myriad pieces without depth or hue.

  “The outcome was disastrous,” Emilia said. “But the lovemaking wasn’t. At least, I didn’t think so.”

  “Then you must have found the photographs afterwards,” Lynley guessed.

  “You’re very clever, aren’t you? Do you always make quantum leaps of that nature, or do you just like to take risks?” She didn’t wait for him to reply. “I’d wanted John for some time. I admit to being—what’s the worst word for it?—after him. I’d never had much success with men. They always seemed to think of me as a sister. Pat me on the head and send me on my way. But it was different with John. At least, I thought it could be different.”

  “That’s how he describes it as well.”

  “Does he? Well, then there’s the truth. We had something very special over the past year. It was friendship, but it was more. Can you understand that between a man and a woman? Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him curiously, as if arrested by the manner in which he said the single word. “Perhaps you do. But I couldn’t be satisfied with merely an intellectual companion, a sort of soulmate. I’m flesh and blood after all. I wanted John. Finally, on last Friday night, I had him. In bed. Making love to me. Oh, I admit that it was a bit awkward initially. I thought at first that the awkwardness was because of my inexperience. You see, it had been several years since…” She rubbed at a spot on the sleeve of her gown. “But still, it was good between us. It was what I wanted, that closeness. It was like an act of forever for me. Then afterwards, we were in his study. I was wearing his dressing gown and we were talking and laughing about how silly I looked in it. I was near his shelves of books. Feeling so free to be myself for the very first time. I said something about being glad that he left his great intellect in the study when we went into the bedroom—you know the sort of thing, teasing him because, after what we’d shared, I felt able to do so. I pulled one of the books from the shelf. He said, ‘Em, not that one,’ but it was too late. I opened it. He’d hollowed it out—just the sort of thing a guilty schoolboy would have done—and the pictures were inside. Those pictures.” She indicated them weakly.

  “You took them away?”

  “Not initially. I’m terribly naive, I suppose. I thought at first that someone had planted the pictures in John’s study to harm him, perhaps to cost him his job. I remember that I said, ‘My God, John, who could have put these here?’ But then I saw they were his. I saw it on his face. He couldn’t hide it from me, and the pictures themselves had…you can see they have fingerprints all over them, as if someone looked at them—lingered over them…As if someone—” She paused, looking down, clearing her throat. “—as if someone caressed them and loved them and believed that they were real.”

  “Did John defend his possession of them?”

  “He said they were part of some research he was doing for a novel he was planning to write. It was to be a story about how a child becomes involved with a pornographer, how his life is destroyed in the process, what it does to his family. Fiction based on fact, he said.”

  “You didn’t believe him?”

  “I did at first. I knew he’d been wanting to write a novel and even if I hadn’t known, I wanted to believe him. I had to believe him. I couldn’t accept anything else, especially not what the pictures implied about him.”

  “About his sexuality?”

  “That and…” Anguish distorted her features. “He takes photographs. Landscapes. Candid shots of people. He doesn’t hang them on his walls because he doesn’t think they’re good enough. But they are. They really are. It’s like a hobby. Just a hobby. I’ve been telling myself that since Friday night. I still can’t think…I don’t want to believe…” Hastily she dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her gown.

  Lynley saw the painful—and horrible—connection she was making. “You don’t want to believe that he took these pictures,” he said, knowing quite well that he couldn’t face having to believe such an idea himself. “Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “I can’t. It’s bad enough now. I can’t believe that.”

  “Because if you believe it, the natural connection—”

  “He didn’t take Matthew. He didn’t.” Emilia pulled out the rag she had used on her arms and wiped her face with it, forgetting the presence of the ammonium tri-iodide upon it. It blotched her skin yellow like a disease.

  “What happened once you and John were through discussing the pictures?”

  She told them the rest with little hesitation. How she had returned to her room in Galatea House just after midnight; how she left the photographs with John Corntel; how she had thought throughout the rest of the night about the danger they presented to his career; how she returned for them the next evening, insisting that they had to be destroyed.

  “He gave them to you without protest?” Lynley asked.

  “You can imagine how ashamed he was, can’t you? I said that I wanted to destroy them, that I had to destroy them for his sake. He agreed.”

  “How long were you with him?”

  “Ten minutes. Perhaps less.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Early evening. Maybe seven. I couldn’t actually say.”

  Lynley asked her about the lapse of time between receiving the photographs in the early evening and placing them on the rubbish fire in the early hours of the next morning.

  “I didn’t want to be seen,” she replied.

  Sergeant Havers interjected. “Why choose the rubbish fire at all, then? Why not dispose of them elsewhere?”

  “I thought of that at first,” Emilia replied. “But if I threw them away, there was a chance that they would be found in the rubbish. Even if I ripped them up and somebody found the pieces, surely they’d be curious. So I knew I had to burn them, and I couldn’t chance doing so in Galatea House where Cowfrey Pitt might have come upon me. Or one of the girls. So I decided on the rubbish fire as the best place to be rid of them.”

  “Why didn’t you stay to see they burned?” Havers asked.

  “Because I heard a car—the minibus, I suppose—and I didn’t want Frank Orten to see me there and come wandering out to ask what I was burning. So I shoved them onto the pile of rubbish, lit them, and left.”

  “What time was this?” Lynley asked.

  “I’m not certain. I know it was sometime after three. A quarter past? Later?” She folded the rag into a tiny square, smoothing down each crease, staining her fingers on the yellow powder. “It was so important not to be caught. For myself, I admit that. But mostly for John. I thought if I could only do this one thing for him…if I could prove my love in this way…I hurried off when I heard the car. I thought I’d made my escape. But I hadn’t, had I? Someone saw me. You said a pupil saw…” Her voice drifted off. Her eyes lifted quickly. “A pupil? A pupil had taken the minibus?”

  In the end she was so like Lockwood, Lynley thought. If a pupil were guilty, John Corntel was safe. Over and over again, Matthew Whateley was forgotten in the haste to shift blame where it would lie most quietly.

  Lynley and Havers stood on the edge of the lane between the science building and Calchus House. Round them schoolchildren were coming out of buildings and heading towards the dining hall for lunch in the west quadrangle. Lynley noted how eyes avoided them, how conversations ceased as pupils passed.

  “He could have done it,” Havers reflected. She was gazing at Erebus House a short distance away. “We know it wasn’t Frank Orten in the minibus. He wa
s in his room, wasn’t he?”

  “If he’s to be believed,” Lynley replied. “Elaine Roly claims he’d taken his daughter to hospital that night.”

  Havers jotted down a note to herself. “I’ll check it.” She bit the end of the pencil. “If Corntel did it, he’d be clever enough not to use his own car to transport the body up to Stoke Poges, wouldn’t he? He’d know that he couldn’t carry that off without leaving evidence incriminating himself. A fibre. A hair. Something. So he’d get the keys from the porter’s office, take the bus, and be careful not to leave his prints anywhere on it.”

  Lynley couldn’t deny the idea’s plausibility. He thought again about Thomas Gray’s poem, about the stanza that he had read with Deborah St. James, about how it accurately described the boy himself and the manner in which the body had been dealt with. It was hard to believe a pupil would go to trouble like that.

  “The problem is poetry,” Lynley said pensively and explained Thomas Gray’s poem to Sergeant Havers.

  She countered with another idea. “What about all the verses on Chas Quilter’s wall? He seems fairly familiar with English poetry.”

  “Where’s his motive, Sergeant?”

  “There’s that,” she admitted. “There is that, isn’t there?”

  “We’ve two clear-cut motives as far as I can see. Clive Pritchard has one.”

  “John Corntel has the other?”

  Lynley nodded grimly. “How can we look past the implications of that collection of photographs?”

  “A little clutch-and-feel with Matthew, and oops, he’s dead?” Havers asked crudely.

  “Perhaps an accident.”

  “Too tight with the noose? Too liberal with the electricity?”

  The entire idea made Lynley feel ill. He shook off the sensation and felt in his pocket for the keys to his car, which he handed to Havers. “Go to Cissbury, Sergeant,” he told her. “See what kind of verification you can get on Clive Pritchard’s story.”

  “And you, Inspector?” she asked.

  “It’s time to face the worst about John Corntel,” he replied.