So Sellars gently abandoned her to a novel and a cappuccino, and walked to the end of the block. He spotted the truck parked by the corner. It had been described to him in an e-mail he’d received before they left England, although he didn’t go straight up to it and open the passenger door, but instead paused by the window so the driver could see his face. The man behind the wheel was dressed in jeans and an old brown suede jacket, with the hands of someone who wasn’t afraid of manual labor, all cuts and calluses. He didn’t look like any cleric Sellars had ever met before, but Americans, he had already realized, were different from other folk.
“Pastor Warraner?” he said.
“That’s me. You must be Mr. Sellars.” Warraner reached out one of those hard hands, and the two men shook. “Welcome to Prosperous.”
CHAPTER XLVI
Hynes and Gackowska weren’t getting very far with the teachers at Larkin-Brook. From what they were being told, Moon got along well with the other staff, and had no particular issues with any of the pupils, or none “beyond the usual,” as a woman named Elspeth Calley put it. Calley was in her early forties, and single. She’d informed them of this right from the start, Lord knows why, except that she seemed to be inviting the two detectives either to inquire further or to suggest she might somehow be at fault for her unattached status. Calley certainly had an edge to her, Hynes thought. She wasn’t unattractive, but some combination of personal and professional circumstances had served to cut away at her from the inside, and the marks were starting to show through to the skin. Mind you, she was teaching at Larkin-Brook, and had been for fourteen years. That was enough to leave scars on anyone.
“What do you mean by ‘the usual’?” Gackowska asked.
“You’ve seen this place,” said Calley. “It’s hardly Eton. There isn’t a teacher here who hasn’t had some damage done to a car or bike, even a house: eggs thrown, a broken window, dog shit on the doorstep. And you don’t even want to know what they write on the toilet walls.”
Her arms were folded, the fingers of her right hand tapping impatiently: a smoker.
“And how did Romana Moon cope with this?”
“Pretty well, actually. Larkin-Brook hadn’t poisoned her yet. She was young, idealistic, probably thought she could save a handful of them. Someone buckled the wheel on her bike once, but mostly the little bastards seemed to like her. Mind you, the caretaker didn’t tell her what he scrubbed off those toilet walls about her—male and female.”
“But he told you,” said Hynes.
Calley shot him a glare, and he decided she was less attractive than he’d first thought, possibly even a genuinely nasty piece of work, but no joy could come of alienating her.
“Sorry,” said Hynes. “I didn’t mean it to sound so accusatory.”
He did, and she knew it, but they reached an unspoken agreement to let it drop. They had the measure of each other now, or Calley believed she had it of Hynes, an erroneous view he intended to do his best not to correct.
“I get told a lot of things around here,” she said. “It’s one of the privileges of long service.”
Her right hand lifted involuntarily toward her mouth, the index and middle fingers poised, but she caught herself doing it just in time.
“We could stop for a few minutes,” said Hynes, “if you’d like a cigarette.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Takes one to know one.”
“We’re not supposed to smoke on school property,” she said. “It sets a bad example for the pupils.”
Hynes couldn’t imagine how that might be possible, short of burning the place to the ground, but he could tell from Calley’s tone and expression that rarely a day went by without her disposing of a cigarette butt somewhere in the environs of Larkin-Brook.
“What are they going to do?” Hynes said. “Arrest us?”
“You can always show them your badge.”
“Actually, it’s a warrant card, but it must work because I haven’t been nicked yet.”
Hynes stopped just short of tipping her a cheeky wink. He saw Gac-
kowska stare at him and shake her head slightly in wonderment, and, perhaps, disgust. He ignored her. Sometimes a man had to turn on the charm.
“Well, as long as I have police protection,” said Calley, and this time Gackowska’s sigh was audible.
Hynes and Calley stood to leave.
“You all right to stay here?” Hynes asked Gackowska.
“Fine,” she said, although she didn’t sound it.
“They have a library in the corner,” said Hynes, as he drew his ciggies from his pocket in anticipation. “You can always find something improving to read.”
CHAPTER XLVII
In the quiet of the cathedral, Sellars remembered Pastor Warraner—the unfamiliar cadences of the man’s speech, the smell of wood and sweat that filled his truck—and his own gathering anticipation as they followed the road out of Prosperous until they came to a turnoff marked PRIVATE, secured with a lock and chain.
“We’re not trying to hide it,” said Warraner, as he climbed back into the truck after removing the chain, “or not exactly. Most people don’t even know it’s here, because we’ve tried to keep it out of the tourist guides. If someone wants to visit, they can ask, and I’ll always do my best to accommodate them, as long as they have a valid reason for their interest. We get a couple of historians every year, either of religion or architecture, and the occasional student of folklore. They come, ask a few questions, take some pictures, and leave again.”
The second road passed through forest until it arrived at black iron railings that encompassed the town’s original cemetery, now largely fallen out of use. A gate permitted access, but this, too, was locked. As before, Warraner went to open it, but Sellars barely noticed what he was doing. His attention was focused entirely on the small, primitive chapel that stood at the center of the cemetery. Its walls were of rough-hewn gray stone, with an oak door and narrow slit windows, while its orientation was western rather than the more usual eastern orientation of Christian houses of worship.
“Is it what you expected?” Warraner asked, and Sellars wanted to say yes, yes it was, because he had seen photographs, and read accounts of its transportation from Northumbria to America as ballast, and how those blocks were stored until the Familists were ready to move them into the heart of Maine, there to rebuild their house of worship just as it once had been, only for the Familists to fade away, leaving the Blessed Chapel of the Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam as the sole indication they had ever existed here at all.
Or so one version of the story went, because the Familists had never really vanished. Warraner, and the secret others in the town, were testament to that.
But the church was also not as Sellars had anticipated. Its very primitiveness communicated a sense of ancient power, an impression reinforced as Warraner finished unlocking the gate and invited Sellars to enter the churchyard, so that the carvings in the upper corners of the building became visible to Sellars as he advanced, as though emerging from the stones themselves: the Green Man, in all his glory, all his malevolence.
Then Sellars was inside the chapel, with its rows of hard benches, and its absence of any Christian decoration, only four more faces, one on each wall: the Green Man in spring, summer, autumn and winter. Sellars turned circles before the altar, taking in each one, over and over, until finally he asked Warraner if he might be permitted to lie on the floor.
“Of course. Do as you please.”
So Sellars stretched out on the stones, placed his right ear to the floor, and listened. The day was still, the church was silent, and Warraner was standing unmoving by the east wall. Sellars could hear his blood pumping, and the sound of his own breathing, but nothing else. He felt his disappointment as a kind of heat behind his eyes, and a curdling in his stomach. He had traveled all this way, just to—
And then it came.
* * *
ELSPETH CALLE
Y SMOKED ROTHMANS, which were a bit strong for Hynes, so he stuck to his own Silk Cut Purple. They talked about the school, and the weather. Calley asked Hynes how long he’d been married, and he told her that he and his wife had been married for fifteen years, but together for twenty. She inquired if he was happy, and he replied that he was, because it was the truth. He didn’t think she was coming on to him, or not exactly. Were he single, and were Calley in the right frame of mind, she might have consented to meet him for a drink, or something more. Mostly, though, he believed that she was lonely, and unhappy, and was genuinely curious as to why others were not.
“So,” said Hynes, “did everybody really like Romana Moon?”
“Yes, they did. Even I liked her, I suppose, and I don’t have much affection for anyone.”
“You used to chat?”
“In the staff room, mostly. Once or twice when some of us went out for drinks together.”
“I’d been told she didn’t socialize a lot with the teachers outside school.”
“Not with the teachers, no.”
She let that dangle like a hook, to see if Hynes would bite, and he did.
“Are you saying she might have been friendly with students?”
“What do you mean by ‘friendly’?”
“What do you mean by it?”
Calley took a long drag on her cigarette, and scratched at her left calf with the toe of her right shoe. She had good legs, even if the same couldn’t have been said of her heart.
“I heard you put Ryan Clifton in his place,” she remarked.
“I’m sure he’s a decent kid,” said Hynes, “deep down.”
“I’m sure he isn’t. He has a friend, Karl Holmby. Karl’s brighter than Clifton, which wouldn’t be hard, and possesses what passes for sensitivity around here, meaning the girl sometimes comes before he does. Karl left school last year with a couple of A levels. Romana helped him a lot. I think he wanted to do well in order to impress her, and he kept the rest of the pack at bay in return, so she had an easier ride thanks to him.”
She emphasized the word “ride,” just in case Hynes had failed to catch the innuendo.
“Was she sleeping with him?”
“I don’t think so, or not back then. She wasn’t a fool. She enjoyed teaching, and didn’t want to risk being fired—or sent to prison. But there was something between them. She knew Karl liked her, and under other circumstances she might have been inclined to take it a step further. He certainly wanted it. You could smell it off him.”
Good Christ, thought Hynes.
“And then?”
“Karl left school, and Romana left her boyfriend.”
“But the two events weren’t connected,” said Hynes. “You said Holmby left school last year, but Romana was still seeing Simon Harris until earlier this year.”
“Well, somewhere along the way she and Karl got together.”
“How do you know? Did you see them?”
“No. It was something Ryan Clifton said to me.”
“Really?”
Hynes couldn’t imagine Elspeth Calley giving Ryan Clifton the time of day. In fact, it was hard to conceive of her even being willing to teach him, assuming he could be taught.
“Clifton’s a vile specimen. Your lot will have to deal with him down the line, I guarantee it. Funny, his mum is lovely, and we had his older sister a few years back, and she was no trouble at all. But Ryan Clifton is a dirty bugger, and cruel with it. He’s been suspended a couple of times for vandalism and bullying, although he’s cunning enough to have avoided expulsion so far.
“Anyway, I had a confrontation with him about a month ago: another assignment he’d failed to deliver, which expanded into a discussion of his general behavior. Before I knew it, he was shouting, and I was shouting back. I should have known better than to engage with him on that level, but I had a headache, it had been a worse day than usual, and all I wanted was to go home and pour myself a large glass of wine.
“Eventually I just told him to get out. I probably said some things I shouldn’t have, such as how he was destined to end up on the dole, or in jail, but nothing that wasn’t the truth. I was sick and tired of him, but also a bit scared. He’s intimidating, and has a temper. I was relieved to see him storm off, but then he stopped at the door, and when he turned back it was as though he’d sloughed off all his anger, but what was left behind was so much worse, like the muck at the bottom of a pond after the water has drained away.”
She sucked again on her cigarette, but more nervously now.
“And he said: ‘It’s okay, Miss Calley, I won’t hold it against you. When I leave here, I’ll come back and give you a good fucking, if you want, just like Karl fucked Miss Moon.’ ”
“Those were his exact words?”
“Yes.”
“You believed he was telling the truth?” said Hynes.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d seen the way Clifton had been looking at Romana during the year, and how she tried not to catch his eye. I couldn’t figure out what was behind it, but when he said that, it made sense to me.”
“Karl Holmby might have lied to Clifton about the relationship,” said Hynes. “It wouldn’t be the first time a teenage boy made claims like that in order to look big in front of his mates.”
Calley stubbed out her cigarette against the wall, and dropped the butt down a drain.
“Clifton’s attitude said different, or it did to me.”
“Did you raise the subject with Romana?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“We were colleagues, not friends. It wasn’t my business, really, and it was only a suspicion.”
“Did you tell anyone else, or report what Clifton said to you in the classroom?”
“No. I didn’t want to get Romana into trouble. Even if it wasn’t true, it would have caused all kinds of difficulties for her.”
Hynes considered all she’d told him. He’d barely smoked his own cigarette, so intently had he been listening to Calley. He tapped off the dangling ash, took a last drag, and sent the butt the way of Calley’s, since it wasn’t as though the school had seen fit to provide a bin for the disposal of illicit ciggies. He’d need addresses for Clifton and Holmby, but he didn’t want to ask the school secretary because it would immediately get around that the police were asking about them. Neither did he entirely trust Elspeth Calley. He was thawing slightly toward her, mostly because she wasn’t scared to appear awful, but he had learned long ago that—shock, horror—people sometimes shared information with the police for entirely self-serving reasons, and were not above sowing discontent out of vindictiveness, or a desire to settle old scores. Calley might have claimed to like Romana Moon, but this had to be put in the context of an individual who had already admitted to not being very fond of anyone at all.
“What’s Karl Holmby doing now?” said Hynes.
“He’s at Teesside University.”
“What’s he studying?”
“I’d have to check. It’s something scientific.”
“Do you have home addresses for the two boys?”
“I’m sure I do, somewhere,” she said, “but you could just—” She paused, and he could see her thought processes following his own. “You don’t want to go through the school, right?”
“Not if I can avoid it.”
Hynes felt himself entering into a devil’s pact with Calley, if only out of expediency. He was using her, but also playing into her hands. She clearly enjoyed gossip, and gossip was always about power. Neither did he hold out much hope for her keeping quiet about Karl Holmby. If Calley was willing to share her speculations with the police, she was also capable of spreading them more widely, if she hadn’t already done so, whatever she might claim to the contrary. Still, a warning wouldn’t hurt.
“I have to advise you not to share what you’ve just told me with anyone else,” he said, “not until I’ve had a chance to talk to Holmb
y and Clifton. If rumors of a relationship were to get out, and affect the course of the investigation, you could find yourself in legal difficulties.”
It was rubbish, of course, and Calley probably intuited as much, but Hynes knew that few among the populace did not retain some fear of the law. In fact, the only people who didn’t were criminals; the more bent they were, the less they were afraid.
“I won’t say anything,” she said. She checked her watch. “Is it okay if I go now? I have a free period next, and it’s one thing giving up class time to talk to you, and another to give up my own.”
Hynes told her that she was welcome to do whatever she liked, but he had two more questions for her before she left.
“You said Ryan Clifton scared you, and that you weren’t the only one frightened of him. Do you think he or Holmby might be capable of killing someone?”
“You mean, capable of killing Romana Moon?”
“Yes.”
Calley gave the question serious thought.
“Clifton could hurt a person, but deep down I suspect he’s a coward, like all bullies, and he doesn’t have the psychological resilience required to hide his involvement in a murder. Even when he’s pulled up for bad behavior at school, he can’t disguise his guilt. Karl is different: there’s real intelligence behind the charm, but also something rotten. Someday Clifton will end up behind bars, but it won’t be for a great criminal enterprise. It’ll be for thieving, or the consequences of a blow struck in anger, and you won’t have to try hard to get a conviction. But if Karl Holmby ever finds himself in the dock, he’ll make you work for your money, and whatever he’s done will see him put away for a long time. Does that answer your first question?”
“It does, with interest,” said Hynes.
“And the second?”
“We’re asking this of everyone, so please don’t be offended by it.”
“I’m very difficult to offend.”
Hynes doubted that, but let it pass.
A Book of Bones Page 23
