School for Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Well, well—to think there are people in this world who can’t guess how that will end. So be it. I hope you realize you could get me into trouble with the Great God Crumwallis. If it’s not over in ten minutes—bed all the same.’

  But ten minutes sufficed for the blazing gun-fight, and for the affecting death scene with soaring strings. Then Hilary kicked the boys along to the dormitory, and supervised their minimal ablutions.

  ‘Kindly inspect your flannel, Wattling, in case your hidden enemy has concealed a Samurai sword in it. . . Do shut up, Tilney: no wonder little Toby is such an insensitive oaf, if he has to listen to that racket every night . . . Is that tear in your pyjamas due to the age of the garment, Martins, or is it a feeble attempt to be provocative?’

  Finally he got them all into bed.

  ‘Right. Ten minutes’ reading, then lights out.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to read to us?’

  ‘I am not. You’re confusing me with Nanny Freely. You’ll have to wait to see what happens to the Famous Five until he can read it to you in his own inept fashion. I have to go and see Pickerage.’

  There was a satirical moan.

  ‘Enough of your jealousy. I’m only going to give him his medicine.’

  There was another satirical moan. Hilary marched off coolly, and continued along the corridor.

  ‘Right,’ he said at the door of the sick room. ‘And how do we feel after the Frome treatment?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Pickerage, looking perky. ‘All right, really.’

  ‘Good. And now the patient must have the Crumwallis treatment.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Hilary. I feel better. Honestly. Anyway, that stuff is stomach medicine. Mrs C.’s got no idea. There’s nothing wrong with my stomach.’

  ‘Nevertheless, swallow it down you must. Two table-spoonsful, as prescribed by Florence Nightingale Crumwallis, the lady with the lamp and the face like a granite quarry.’

  Pickerage laughed in spite of himself. Hilary Frome fetched the bottle and spoon from the corridor, and took a glass from the cabinet by the window.

  ‘Oh, come on, Hilary. Pour it down the sink.’

  Hilary was distracted by the window, and peered out into the darkness, watching for signs of movement.

  ‘All quiet on the Western front . . . No, medicine it is, I’m afraid, Malcolm, old boy. I cannot betray my terrust. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though. Old Crumwallis said I could have a glass of sherry. Think of that! A . . . glass . . . of . . . sherry! From the headmaster’s own cellar! What princely munificence! Well, I’ll go and get myself a glass, and we’ll drink together.’

  ‘I don’t see how that benefits me. I’ve still got to drink that ukky medicine.’

  ‘Ungrateful little swine,’ said Hilary. ‘I’m promising you a gracious occasion, so try to behave with a bit of savoir faire. If you’re good I’ll let you have a sip or two of the head’s genuine Cyprus Amontillado, to wash down Dr MacLaren’s bowel mixture. We haven’t had a chance of drinking together, have we, Malcolm? Due to the lunacy of the English licensing laws. Perhaps next summer we could go to the Continent—drink at a pavement café. I’ll go get me that sherry.’

  At the door Hilary bellowed along the corridor to the junior dormitory:

  ‘Lights out!’

  Then he darted downstairs. When he returned two or three minutes later, he brought with him the fragrance (in Dickensian phrase) of a fairy emerging from a wine vault, and hiccoughing.

  ‘You’ve had one already,’ said Pickerage.

  ‘A mere soupçon. Old Crumwallis won’t notice I’ve had more than his miserly allowance. He doesn’t care for drink, or for any of the good things of life. And anyhow, I’m his blue-eyed boy. He wouldn’t begrudge me an extra glass. Now . . . two tablespoonsful, Nurse Toby said.’

  ‘Ugh. That stuff’s disgusting. Can’t we throw it away, Hilary? Look at the bottle. It’s about a hundred years old. You’re not supposed to keep medicine that long.’

  ‘Nonsense. They just never change the label. Mrs Crumwallis uses gallons of the stuff. Probably keeps the firm in business. This came fresh last week from their labs in Birmingham—just by the detergents factory . . . Right, now here’s your glass . . . Now, let’s drink.’

  There was a bang, and a flutter of suppressed laughter from along the corridor. Hilary went to the door and shouted.

  ‘Quiet there, you infant menaces, or I’ll be along and slipper the lot of you in a minute.’

  Then he came back.

  ‘Right, Malcolm, let’s have a toast. I propose—sounds a bit corny, but toasts always do—I propose “To Us”. Come on—bottoms up, luvvy.’

  He grinned a charming smile as he assumed the cockney charwoman’s accent, and they both raised their glasses and drank.

  • • •

  Ten minutes later, Mr and Mrs Crumwallis, returning earlier than they expected from the wine and cheese do, heard even from their quarters the noise from the boarding section. Running to the connecting door they opened it, and stared aghast at the scene.

  Hilary Frome, stretched face down along the floor, was writhing and retching at the top of the stairs. Around him, wide-eyed, curious, afraid, were the boarders, young and old. Broughton, the oldest boarder, was slapping Hilary on the back, then in desperation pushing him over and trying to massage his stomach.

  ‘Get it up, whatever it was, Hilary. For Christ’s sake get it up. Tilney, for pity’s sake go and call a doctor. I don’t understand what to do. Get on the phone to his dad, for Christ’s sake!’

  But it was the head who ran to his study to phone. And it was Mrs Crumwallis who ran up the stairs and incompetently took charge. And it was leaning his head on Mrs Crumwallis’s bosom that, ten minutes later, Hilary Frome expired. Connoisseur of bizarre sensations though he was, it was probably not the deathbed Hilary would have chosen.

  CHAPTER 8

  MR CRUMWALLIS’S CONSTERNATION

  Within an hour of Mr Crumwallis’s telephone call to the school doctor, the police were in residence at Burleigh. Within an hour and a half a detective-superintendent had arrived from Sturford, and had taken charge.

  Somebody had to. Mr Crumwallis, the fragile façade of his public personality shattered, seemed to be in a state of near-breakdown. He shouted directions to the boarders, and, when they were ignored, he shouted contrary orders. He and Broughton carried the dead body of Hilary Frome from its resting place at the top of the stairs, and laid it on the bed in the sick bay. The doctor, when he arrived, tut-tutted at this, but he decided that this—like everything else—was a matter for the police. When Superintendent Pumfrey arrived, charging in like a drill sergeant-major bursting in on some particularly slack recruits, he found the local Cullbridge Police already well into the routine work, with the Crumwallises fussing around upstairs and downstairs, vocal but ineffectual. A little knot of boys, white but wide-eyed, stood in the doorway of the dormitory. From inside Pumfrey could hear the sound of a boy crying.

  ‘By gum!’ he expostulated, more to himself than to his sergeant or anybody else. Then he raised his voice in the direction of the only civilian male adult around.

  ‘Are you a master here?’ he demanded.

  Mr Crumwallis let out a high whinny.

  ‘Er—headm—’

  ‘Well, please go to your quarters. Or somewhere away from these stairs. Enough seems to have been destroyed already. The photographers will have to make what they can of what’s left. I shall need a room—’

  ‘There are—er—classrooms . . .’

  ‘Do you have a study?’

  ‘Er—yes.’

  ‘That will do.’

  Mr Crumwallis, even in his broken state, muttered aggrievedly to himself that the Superintendent hadn’t asked, and Mrs Crumwallis stared at Pumfrey with stony dislike. The head pointed, offendedly, in the direction of his own quarters.

  ‘Through there.’

  ‘Right. Will you please hold yourselves ready. But keep away from
the stairs and the sick bay . . . Oh glory, what’s that?’

  That was the door of the boarding annexe banging open, and Toby Freely and four of the boarders dashing in.

  ‘What’s happened? Why are all those—?’

  ‘Who are you?’ bellowed Pumfrey, in his most parade-ground voice. ‘Head boy or something?’

  ‘Er—Mr Freely,’ murmured the headmaster. ‘In charge of the boarding section. Er—a Portlington boy.’

  Superintendent Pumfrey looked at him in bewilderment, then turned back to Toby.

  ‘Right. You look competent enough. Get all those boys into the dormitory, and keep them there. I don’t care what you do—I don’t suppose the little blighters will go off to sleep—but keep them there and out of the way of my men—right? And be careful when you go up the stairs—OK?’

  ‘There’s a fire-escape we could use.’

  ‘Right. Use it. Though it’s a bit like shutting the stable door. Now—where’s this study?’

  And with Superintendent Pumfrey marching off through the door into the private quarters of the Crumwallises, the investigation into the death of Hilary Frome began in earnest.

  • • •

  Superintendent Michael Pumfrey came from the Swessex Police Headquarters at Sturford. Swessex, a bastard county created by the iniquitous reorganization of local government in the early ’seventies, comprised one and a half old counties knocked together because it looked neater that way. It was therefore larger than the old units, and infinitely more inefficient. Sturford, however, was no more than twenty miles away from Cullbridge, so Pumfrey’s take-over at the scene of the murder had been reasonably quickly achieved. Michael Pumfrey had spent part of his childhood in Cullbridge, though the existence of Burleigh School had made no particular impression on him at the time. When he had been shown the study he drew in Sergeant Fenniway, pointedly shut the door, and said again ‘By gum!’

  He was not, in fact, from the North Country, but he knew no better expression for letting off steam and easing pent-up irritation. He held his temper on a pretty short fuse, and it was as liable to explode in the face of a headmaster as in that of a dustman. More liable. He was not tall, close to minimum height in fact, but he was stocky, and he made up for lack of inches with a pressing, high-speed manner which sometimes made people think he was all noise and movement and no intelligence. In fact, the noise and movement were outward expressions of a relentlessly ticking brain. His hair was slicked back in a manner popular in the ’fifties, and his hardbitten face was hardly softened by a neat black moustache of the sort that Herr Hitler had driven out of fashion.

  Once in the room he looked again at Fenniway and let out a splutter of irritation.

  ‘That’s someone I’m going to bite the head off of before this investigation’s over!’

  ‘Not his usual self at all,’ said Fenniway. ‘Came here myself as a boy once—playing football. Very different he was then. Condescending as you like. The lord of the educational manor condescending to fraternize with the plebs.’

  ‘Is that so? Doesn’t surprise me. It seems he goes to pieces in a crisis, then. Not what one expects from a headmaster. Did I gather he had only just arrived back?’

  ‘Apparently. The boy—his name’s Hilary Frome, by the way—was retching at the top of the stairs when he and that hatchet-faced wife of his got in. I talked to the boy who’d been trying to help this Frome—trying to get him to vomit it up, and so on. It was no use, he said. The headmaster couldn’t have done anything.’

  ‘That’s as maybe. I’d like to know exactly why he’s gone so completely off his head. There’s a local doctor called Frome. Could be a pretty influential parent. Should we speak to this Crumwallis first, do you think, while the technical chaps are playing their games upstairs?’

  ‘Well,’ said Fenniway, ‘I gather there’s a boy—’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘A young lad. He was in the sick bay.’

  ‘I saw some damnfool medicine up there.’

  ‘Yes. It was for him. I gather Frome was in the room with him when he—well, started retching.’

  ‘Hmmm. Best see him and get it over. Then he can go to bed if he’s nothing to do with it. Not that the poor chap’s likely to get much sleep tonight.’

  Superintendent Pumfrey looked around the study, and once more said, ‘By gum!’

  ‘Something getting you, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Pretty rum kind of school this, wouldn’t you say, Fenniway? Would you send your son here?’

  ‘He’s about minus three months at the moment, sir, if that’s what it is.’

  ‘Oh well, I don’t think this is the kind of place you have to put them down for at birth. Plenty of time for you to make a decision. I don’t know what it is about this study . . . sort of phoney. These books—they look like a second-hand bookshop.’

  ‘Probably does buy books at that kind of place.’

  ‘Yes. But it looks as if he went in and said “I’ll have that wall.” To furnish the study.’ Mike Pumfrey punched the books aggressively, and then peered at them. ‘Look, here’s Southey’s History of the Peninsular War next to Angel Pavement. And here’s volume one of Old Mortality with volume two over there. Just shoved up on the shelves with no order or reason. Like . . . like a stage set. What was that play all the amateur dramatics people used to do?’

  ‘Amateur dramatics was a bit before my time, sir.’

  ‘Nonsense. They’re still at it. You just plonk your arse down in front of the telly and don’t realize. What was that play? The Happiest Days of Your Life. That’s it. This looks like a set for The Happiest Days of Your Life. A thought struck him. ‘Well, I don’t think those kids up there are going to count this as one of them.’

  He turned back to Fenniway. ‘I’m wasting time. Will you get that kid in?’

  Fenniway crossed through again into the boarding annexe, and sent a message up by one of the constables helping the technicians on the stairs. After a wait Toby came along the upstairs corridor and sent Pickerage down with an encouraging pat on the shoulder. Pickerage looked as if he needed it.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Fenniway called up to Toby. Toby looked down and grimaced.

  ‘As well as can be expected, as they say.’

  Which was about how you would describe Pickerage. He had clearly been sobbing fit to burst, but he was now past that. His face, however, was smeared by the dabbings he had made at it with a stupendously dirty handkerchief. He was conspicuously trying to be brave, but it was quite clear he had been devastated by the experience. Even now, quiet, there seemed to be a sob perpetually at the back of his throat. One thing about him struck Pumfrey as being unboyish: he seemed to be taking no pleasure from being so sensationally at the centre of things.

  Mike Pumfrey had wondered whether the two of them might sit and talk things over in the two easy chairs—stained, dusty, pre-war relics, that squatted capaciously in the far corner of the study. But he thought something more normal might pay dividends, something that was more within the boy’s everyday range of experience, so he sat himself behind the headmaster’s desk and cultivated an air of briskness. As soon as he saw Pickerage he knew he had been right: here was a boy who had often gone for interviews in the headmaster’s study.

  ‘Right, now, sit down, old chap. I realize this has been a horrible thing to happen to you. But we’re going to talk to you first, and then you can start putting it behind you. We’ve got to find out exactly what happened before this boy—Hilary Frome, is that the name?—died, and you’re the one who can help us.’

  Pickerage nodded dully.

  ‘Now, what exactly happened?’

  ‘When Hilary died, you mean?’

  ‘Then and earlier. Let’s go back a bit, shall we? You were in the sick bay, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I had a fever. I think I caught a cold on . . . on Sunday.’ Pickerage gulped. ‘Anyway, Hilary came in—’

  ‘Hold your horses. Was Hilary a boarder?
’

  ‘Oh no. He was in charge because Toby had to go with the swimmers to Sturford. Hilary’s going to . . .’ He stopped. ‘He was going to be head boy next year. He was my friend.’

  ‘I see. That’s why you’re so upset, is it?’ Pickerage paused, and then nodded. Perhaps he felt there was no point in pretending not to be upset. ‘So you were in the sick bay, and naturally Hilary came to see you. When was that?’

  ‘He shouted to me as he was going out to play cricket with the other boys. Then, when they came in, he came up to see me for a bit.’

  Pumfrey noticed that a slight flush came into Pickerage’s face, and he looked down at his hands, clasping and unclasping themselves nervously in his lap.

  ‘And what did you talk about? What did you do?’

  Pickerage said hurriedly; ‘We talked about Muggeridge. Hilary went to the window and looked out, and he said Muggeridge was stalking around outside.’

  ‘I see. Is that the caretaker?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Pickerage, wide-eyed and somewhat scornful, was clearly incredulous that anybody should not be familiar with the details of his own small world. ‘Muggeridge is the games master. He’s awful. All smelly, and then he gets downs on you, and takes it out on you. He was supposed to go with the swimmers.’

  Click-click went the little machine in Pumfrey’s brain that was card-indexing all this information, putting arrows against all the possible trails. Normally he would have taken notes, but he knew that Pickerage would be doubly uneasy if he did that.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he went away and watched the television with the others. Later on I heard him go with them to the dorm. Then he came down to—’ the boy gulped—‘to give me my medicine.’

  ‘That’s the medicine we found in the sick bay, is it?’

  Pumfrey had already noticed it was a patent stomach medicine. Pickerage nodded, and then, in a sudden access of indignation, said:

  ‘That’s right. Old mother . . . Mrs Crumwallis gives you just anything. It’s not right. She’s no idea. She could kill you.’ He caught himself up in horrified confusion. ‘Anyway, I said I didn’t want to take it. There’s nothing wrong with my stomach. We could have poured it down the sink. But Hilary said I had to. And he said he’d go down and get himself a sherry.’