In At The Deep End

by Anabel Donald

  Now I saw him in daylight I realized he had salt-shaker dandruff and a set of spots like a Braille version of the Bible; however he also had a pleasant voice and an engaging manner. If I didn’t look at him, particularly at his face, all was well.

  I began gently, with a pitch about the documentary and my need for background material on the school. No questions about the odd incident in his room. When I stopped talking, he nodded. He didn’t look convinced, nor did he look sceptical. He looked as if he was thinking about something else. ‘You said you knew about Olivier?’ he said. ‘In the note you wrote in my room. What did you mean?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Matilda Beckford. I know Olivier never did his community service, and you covered up for him.’ He nodded again, and waited for a question to answer.

  I banged on for a bit asking about the community service programme and the school in general. He answered through mouthfuls of food. His comments were fair enough answers but unexpanded and basically non-committal. Rissington was ‘OK, I suppose’. The community service programme ‘didn’t do any harm’ and was ‘better than doing monkey-crawls across the Brecon Beacons’, He added to this, fair-mindedly, that lots of the other boys preferred doing monkey-crawls, because they were better at it than he was. I was taping the conversation because I thought it might make him feel more important. The tape didn’t seem to inhibit him.

  ‘Did Olivier prefer doing monkey-crawls?’

  ‘We called him Desmoulins at school, of course,’ he pointed out sharply. ‘Why do you want to know about him?’

  ‘Background, I suppose.’

  ‘Desmoulins didn’t like painting houses and talking to old women, that’s for sure. He didn’t mind monkey-crawls.’

  ‘When he didn’t come with you on the community service programme, what did he do instead?’

  The boy stopped chewing. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he said.

  ‘Mrs Beckford says you didn’t like him.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’

  ‘And I was just interested. In the running of the school. How could Olivier get away with not doing the community service without the school finding out?’

  ‘Easily, if I covered for him. It’s not the school’s fault. It’s always like that, in schools. They can’t know everything, although some housemasters like to pretend they do.’

  ‘What’s Brown like as a housemaster?’

  ‘He’s OK. He doesn’t count.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s not interested. If there’s a foul-up, Mrs Brown deals with it.’

  ‘And why did you cover for Olivier?’

  There was a terrible sucking, glugging noise as his straw chased the last of the milk shake.

  ‘I like McDonald’s,’ he said, apparently inconsequentially. ‘You know where you are, at McDonald’s.’ He looked me directly in the eye, not something he’d done before. ‘I’m not sure if I know where I am with you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘OK, you tell me you’re researching a television documentary. So how do I know that when you make it, you don’t use something I say, and even if you don’t name me, they’ll know that only I could have said it, and then I’ll be in even more trouble than I usually am?’

  ‘Are you usually in trouble?’

  ‘Answer my question first.’

  ‘I can give you my word that nothing you tell me will be used on television in such a way that “they” know it’s you who told me, if that’s what you mean. Who’s “they”?’

  ‘How do I know if I can trust your word?’

  This was an unusually suspicious sixteen-year-old. I sympathized. When I’d been his age, or long before come to that, I’d learnt not to trust anyone’s word. Not necessarily because they meant to lie, but because they mostly couldn’t deliver.

  He was right, though. I’d waste a lot of time if I didn’t tell him at least some of the truth. ‘What I actually want to know is about Olivier. I am researching for a documentary, partly, and you can ring the producer to check if you like, but I’m also a private detective.’

  I don’t know what reaction I expected. I was showing off, a little. Never show off to an adolescent: they’re connoisseurs. He looked at me with mild interest tempered by disbelief.

  ‘I’m investigating the circumstances surrounding Olivier’s death,’ I said. ‘But I must ask you to keep it to yourself.’ I was stung. I suppose I expected him to find it as exciting as I still did.

  ‘I’ll keep it to myself, all right,’ he said. ‘Who are you investigating for?’

  I wasn’t tempted to tell him, since I didn’t know. ‘An unnamed client,’ I said sniffily.

  ‘Not the police?’

  ‘No, of course not the police. I told you I was a private detective.’

  ‘Do you have any proof of that?’

  I passed him one of my cards. He held it in his grubby-nailed, stubby plump hands. ‘Is there much money in it? In being a private investigator?’

  ‘Not steady money. I only do it part-time.’

  ‘I’m going to earn tons of money,’ he said. ‘One day,’ and looked at me with the slight pity of one who would not be fat and spotty for ever, and saw his future in a merchant bank.

  ‘Good. Meanwhile will you answer my questions about Olivier? And not tell anyone at school I’ve been asking?’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘My fee is fifty pounds.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. Plummer’s client could afford it. If he couldn’t, he shouldn’t have hired Plummer.

  ‘Should I have asked more?’

  Probably he should. I’d have paid it. What he had to tell me might very well be all I needed to know. ‘Maybe. But you didn’t, and it’s too late now.’

  ‘But we’d better leave here. It’s out of bounds during the week, and there’s no point in tempting fate.’ We ended up sitting on a rotting bench by the canal. It was too hot in the car. His skin looked even worse in full June sunlight. ‘I’ve only got half an hour, so you’d better make it quick,’ he said.‘What d’you want to know?’

  ‘Tell me about Olivier.’

  ‘He was a shit,’ he said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘The usual way.’

  ‘You’ll have to give me more than that. I’m paying you, remember.’

  ‘Not as much as you might have done.’

  ‘And you’re wasting my time. Fifty pounds for thirty minutes is a good rate. Now get on with it. Tell me about Olivier.’

  ‘He wanted everything his own way. He thought he was terrific and everyone else was less than the dust.’

  ‘Everyone else, or just you?’

  ‘Everyone else, but especially me, because I’m pretty low in the pecking order at Rissington. Do you know much about it?’

  ‘I know it’s quasi-military.’

  ‘It is, and I can’t do military things. I’m slow and I’m clumsy and I’m not very strong, and I’m not at all interested. I think the Army is a crock of shit, frankly, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with it if it was up to me.’

  ‘So why are you there?’

  ‘My stepfather wants me to be licked into shape.’

  Neither of us thought that was likely or even possible, in military terms. ‘Was Olivier good at military things?’

  ‘He was OK. He was naturally athletic and a fascist by temperament. He liked running for miles and shouting out orders.’

  ‘Did he like taking them?’

  ‘That depended who gave them. He didn’t take orders from me, for instance, and he should have done because I’m in charge of the community service programme so I’m the senior officer. But he wouldn’t do anything I told him and he knew I couldn’t make him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report him to the Major?’

  ‘What kind of berk would that have made me look? I’ve got to get a decent reference out of this school somehow.’

  ‘For university?’

  ‘Yes. I want to go to Cambridge. I�
��ll get my four As at A-level, all right, but the headmaster’s report can make a difference and I’m not going to risk it.’

  ‘So that’s why you covered for him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not because you were afraid he might beat you up if you didn’t?’ I wasn’t going to let his over-confidence run on too long. He might spin me a yarn because he liked the sound of his own boasting.

  ‘He beat me up for fun anyway,’ he said, unfazed. ‘They all do.’

  ‘If he was so unpleasant to you, did it make it difficult sharing a room with him?’

  His eyes met mine and slid away. ‘Not particularly. I managed.’

  ‘You were in the san the night he died?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He wasn’t going to ask me how I knew. I guessed that information was a matter of pride to Tim, and he wasn’t going to grant me the advantage of knowing more than he did.

  ‘What was the matter with you?’

  ‘Flu, I think.’

  ‘Why can’t you remember? Are you often in the san?’

  ‘As often as I can manage, if it helps me get out of things. The food’s better there, anyway.’

  ‘When did you hear of Olivier’s death?’

  ‘Break time. Matron said I was well enough to move back to my room, and when I got there I saw that his things had gone. So I asked, and somebody told me.’

  ‘Who packed his stuff up?’

  ‘Dunno. Could have been Mrs Brown, or Mrs Ellis.’

  ‘You weren’t sorry when he died?’

  ‘No, but I didn’t kill him. Do you think it was murder?’

  I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake. The last thing Plummer would want would be Tim spreading the rumour that Olivier had been murdered. Was it likely that he would keep quiet about such a juicy piece of information? He’d use it, surely, to impress the others. He was low down the pecking order. This might raise him a bit. Knowledge was power. I had to divert him from that idea.

  ‘There’s no suggestion of that,’ I said. ‘What I’m supposed to be finding out is Olivier’s state of mind.’

  ‘When?’ he said.

  ‘Just before he died.’

  ‘It’s a stupid bloody question,’ he said. ‘Who’d want to know that?’

  I could hear and see myself in this unappealing, acute outsider, and I felt as impatient with him as Plummer had with me. ‘I think my client’s worried in case he committed suicide,’ I said.

  He shook his head emphatically, and I leaned away from the shower of dandruff. ‘No way. Not Desmoulins. He’d never have topped himself. Much more likely to be an accident – he drank a lot. I can imagine someone murdering him, as well. But not suicide. Never.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was too pleased with himself. He thought he was great. God’s gift to everything.’

  ‘Can you remember the day before his death?’

  ‘Quite well. Because when he died, I wondered who’d killed him, and I tried to work it out.’

  ‘Why?’

  He sighed impatiently. ‘Don’t you know anything about power? I’ve got none, as I stand up. None. Not in that school. Nobody reads and nobody listens to music, and they’re only interested in maths and physics if they’re calculating the trajectory of a bullet. If someone had killed him I wanted to know, so I could shut up about it and keep out of their way. So’s I wouldn’t be next.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And what did you think?’

  He looked at me unblinkingly. Even his eyelashes had dandruff. You could get an ointment for that, I fleetingly considered telling him. But he probably knew. Just as he knew he should use an anti-dandruff shampoo, get pills for his acne, and control his diet. Tim’s problem wasn’t what he knew but what he could make himself do.

  ‘I had no idea,’ he said finally.

  I’d come back to it later. ‘Tim, someone told me Rissington Abbey was evil. What do you think they meant?’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘An unnamed source. Is it evil?’

  ‘Evil? It’s bloody awful for me, I know that.’

  ‘In the prospectus it says that there’s a special fee structure for boys with problems. What kind of problems?’

  ‘The usual. Getting chucked out of other places. Drugs, bunking off. Everatt broke his housemaster’s arm, but he’s a special case.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s mad. The last Brecon trip, he tried to organize a party to torture sheep.’

  Was he putting me on? ‘Did they go?’

  ‘No. They’d marched fifteen miles already. They were shattered.’

  He was putting me on.

  Two men jogged past us on the towpath. Middle-aged, fit. Saturday football players, perhaps. A pet white poodle, picking its supercilious way along in front of its gay owner, almost visibly shuddered at their robustness. A canal boat chugged past: its waves broke on the walls of the canal.‘It’s going too fast,’ he said.‘They’re not supposed to go more than four miles an hour, you know. It damages the banks.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Let’s get back to Olivier’s last day, shall we?’

  ‘You’ve only got another five minutes, and I’ve plenty to tell you. More than five minutes’ worth. We can meet again on Friday and I’ll give you the lot for two hundred quid.’

  I thought he meant it. I gave him my telephone numbers at the hotel and in London and fixed another meet for two o’clock on Friday: he haggled me up to £200 per hour, and cadged a lift back to school. He made me stop down a lane three hundred yards from the school gates.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tim had been very insistent that I wait a while before following him into the school. He didn’t want ‘them’ to make any connection between him and me. I made a mental note to make him identify ‘them’ properly for me on Friday. Meanwhile, I was in no hurry. I didn’t look forward to going back, myself I found Rissington Abbey fifty per cent boring, fifty per cent spooky.

  Probably I only found it spooky because of what Martin Kelly had said. And even if there was something crawling round under the surface there, something sliming and heaving in the depths, it was nothing to do with me.

  I went back to the hotel. The Accelerated Trainee was off duty, but his spirit lingered on in the messages the girl at the desk gave me. I was to ring three people. The first two were easy: Bratty and Poly. The third hung me up for a minute or two. Who was Klowdier?

  I tried the name out loud as I walked up the stairs. A Japanese passed me as I spoke and smiled in a paroxysm of embarrassment. I bowed: he bowed: we both bowed together and I nearly nutted him.

  Safely at the top of the stairs, I clicked. Claudia. Alan’s Claudia, still pursuing me. I wondered what she wanted, but not enough to ring her back. I made myself a cup of coffee from one of the Wanderotel’s Complimentary Sachets, and I didn’t spill a grain of the gritty powder. I cut off the corner with the scissors on my Swiss army knife. It’s one of the small victories that makes me feel in control.

  I was putting off ringing Barty because I immediately suspected he was ringing me to put the weekend off. I never trust looking forward, when it involves other people. I’d been let down too often.

  My neuroses annoy me. My social worker used to congratulate me, distrustfully, on how ‘well adjusted’ I was. Whenever she did that I knew I was overdoing it and I’d break down and cry a little, to reassure her. But of course she was right; I was ‘well adjusted’ like a radio tracking a shifting FM signal, usually on beam after a fractional delay. It’d cost me a great deal to make the compromises I’d made. And I still tried to avoid disappointment.

  When I’d been very young I’d believed my mother, and she had no grip on reality. One day, I remember, when I was about seven and I was back with her again, she seemed much better, and one day she told me to pack because we were going on a trip to see my grandmother. She described how we were going to a cottage in the country and how I�
��d have a little room to myself and how there’d be a pony and a dog.

  It sounded like one of the books I borrowed from the library, one of the old-fashioned ones with small dense print and few pictures which I chose from the children’s library because they took the longest time to read. Most children’s books only took me half an hour. They had biggish print and contemporary themes, and if I wanted contemporary themes I only had to open my eyes and look.

  I’d already known enough not to believe what my mother said most of the time, but I wanted to believe the grandmother story. I liked the idea of more family. I suppose I hoped that I’d find someone who could help me with my mother, because I couldn’t look after her by myself It was too much for me. So I’d believed this, and packed too, and begun to dream.

  Then she did nothing else about it. The packed suitcases sat by the door all day while my mother went shopping for bruised vegetables. She made a good bruised vegetable stew. One of my few legacies from her: so do I. We ate the stew and the next day I unpacked and I didn’t ask her about my grandmother because I hated seeing the bewildered look in her eyes. I supposed she’d forgotten all about it and I just didn’t mention it and the disappointment was bearable, of course it was.

  But here we were again with another disappointment, I was sure. Barty couldn’t make the weekend.

  So I rang Polly first. She sounded no better: much the same. Several hours dead is what she sounded.Then she said she’d decided to go to her parents’ house for the weekend. She didn’t say why, but I supposed Barty’d persuaded her. So chances were, my weekend was still on, and I needn’t be disappointed. I tried to chat but she wasn’t having any.

  Then I tried Barty, but it was the answering machine, so I left it; but my spirits were restored.

  It was lucky, I thought, that this investigation was so straightforward. I wasn’t concentrating properly. It was lucky I had such a lot of slack time, because I hate it when my concentration goes. You have to keep going over things again and again. You’re not sharp. You can’t be when you’re mooning in a fantasy about what’s going to be happening. And I’d trained myself to ignore bad feelings. That was easy enough: I’d had plenty of practice. It was ignoring good feelings I couldn’t manage.